


Oh My Pretty Precious Stone

by scarredsodeep



Category: AFI
Genre: Angst, Band Fic, Inspired by Real Events, M/M, Slash, Song Lyrics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2016-09-04
Packaged: 2018-03-03 06:31:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 48
Words: 54,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2841404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not an apology, exactly. But it's an explanation.<br/>**<br/>Real-world Javey, extrapolated from lyrics and photo timelines and tours dates. Jade POV. How and why Jade broke both of their hearts. I have been trying to write this story for a long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title is the opening line of "Heart Stops" from Burials. The song is literally addressed to Jade, guys.
> 
> The long-threatened Javey Conspiracy Blog is up and running! See our very first posts [ here ](http://www.inthewhispers.wordpress.com) and a beautiful Javey timeline [ here ](http://www.dipity.com/accidentalwoman/Javey).
> 
> Originally posted at AFIslash.com. Chapters will be double-posted to both sites for as long as AFIslash remains running (early Feb.).

The first boy I ever kissed beat me for it.

I think I understood, even then, that he didn't do it because the kiss was unwelcome. He did it because it was. It wasn’t about me. It was just something he had to do.

It was during a sleepover, in that hazy hour of darkness that stretches between awareness and dreaming, trembling like gilded spider-silk. We lay beside one another, breathing slow, having already been scolded a time too many for making too much noise. The house was still and silent. In a whisper, he asked if I’d ever wondered what it was like to kiss somebody. He asked me if I wanted to kiss him, just to try it. I said I wasn’t sure. No one will know, he whispered. Aren’t you curious? I felt sick, sweaty, scared. I said okay.

So we kissed. We were ten; it didn’t last long. But I had the rest of the weekend to live it over again, stomach fluttering half excited and half sick every time I brushed the smooth edge of the memory. My mind kept returning to it, the same way you stroke with your fingertip a scab you’ve resolved not to pick, over and over again until you pick it. It flickered in and out of my thoughts constantly: watching cartoons in my pajamas, picking mushrooms off my pizza, brushing my teeth and recalling that my mouth wasn't just mine anymore, that someone else had touched and tasted and felt it. As kisses went, I would later learn, it was not noteworthy or transcendental or life-changing. But I couldn't stop thinking about it, either. The knowledge of it bubbled inside me, somewhere between elation and dread. I couldn’t decide if I had liked it or not. Deciding either way didn’t seem important. What had happened was a secret—might as well have been a dream. I knew instinctively that it was not something we would talk about. I wondered if we might repeat it.

I had it, that dubious treasure, like a baby tooth kept too long, yellow and sour and soft-centered with rot but still shiny and sharp at the edges, for the whole weekend. On Monday at school, Ethan came up to me in the hallway where I was hanging my coat on its hook. He didn’t say anything; he just hit me. It wasn’t like the times we’d wrestled, the times I’d scuffled with my brother. It wasn’t pretend. He hit me square in the face with a balled-up fist and that screwed-up face of a kid about to cry. He broke his thumb on the first punch, rumor would later tell, but that didn’t stop him. With fist and boot and tooth and nail he tore into me; when the principal pulled him off me we were both bawling. He ended up with a cast and a week of detention. My bruises wore from black to green to sickly yellow, over time.

Ethan didn’t apologize. He didn’t even look at me, let alone speak to me. It was clear to everyone that our friendship was finished. But he didn’t tell anyone why, either. Every kid in school must have asked him why he did it. The principal and the guidance counselor did. I bet his parents did, too. It would have been easy to say “Because he’s a faggot”; it would have made his life exponentially easier, just saying those four words. But he never did. That’s one of the most decent things anyone has ever done for me, I think. He didn’t say a word.

*

I was twelve years old when the Supreme Court decision on _Bowers v. Hardwick_ ruled sodomy to be a criminal act. It was in the papers, on the news. My parents discussed it at the dinner table.  



	2. Chapter 2

I was twelve years old when the Supreme Court decision on _Bowers v. Hardwick_ ruled sodomy to be a criminal act. It was in the papers, on the news. My parents discussed it at the dinner table.

“I’m not convinced it’s the government’s business what adults choose to do in the privacy of their own home,” my mother said, frowning at the sweet potatoes on her plate. “Do I agree with what they’re doing? No. It goes against nature; it’s perverse. But does that make it a _crime_?”

“How do you think disease spreads, dear? Where do you think AIDS came from?” my dad asked patiently. “Homosexuals pose a very real threat to society. To the health of our children, even. That’s absolutely the government’s business.”

It was a strictly academic debate—the decision affected laws in Georgia, practically a whole continent from big, gay California. I guess Ukiah’s proximity to San Francisco made both my parents feel like they had a unique perspective on the matter, though. Like they were especially at risk. They discussed the menace of homosexuality for the rest of the meal, arguing in a good-natured way about topics they refused to define. It wasn’t until the next day in the school library that I even found out what sodomy was. I blushed for the rest of the day, after that. I’d actually considered asking the librarian about it before consulting a dictionary. Merriam-Webster’s neutral, clinically phrased stance on the topic was unable to disguise the inherently shameful nature of the act. The grotesque nature of those who committed it. The bald-faced fact that it could just as easily describe sex with animals as sex between two men. The sneering implication that there wasn’t a difference, really.

It was my first lesson on the subject. I didn’t forget.

*

The second time I kissed a boy, it made him cry.  



	3. Chapter 3

The second time I kissed a boy, it made him cry.

I had a girlfriend at the time, one I liked. At seventeen, there hadn’t been a whole lot of opportunity to consider it, but if asked I would have said I was faithful. The loyal type. Firmly opposed to infidelity. Everyone is, probably, until the occasion arises to try it out.

Anyway, I’ve never had much sense when it came to Davey.

We met at this punk house I used to hang out at. Even as an undersized freshman, he was fierce-faced, unflinching, but at the same time soft. Even when he was embarrassing himself trying to prove that he was tough, there was something about him that was gentle, that demanded care and protection. Surreptitiously, I watched him. I didn’t mean to. He drew the eye.

One day he fell. He was on his board, trying a move that was notoriously hard to land. He moved through the air so fluidly, like he had perfect awareness of every last centimeter of his skin, that you couldn’t even tell he’d messed up until he was on the ground. It was one of the bitterest wipe-outs I’d ever seen; it tore his jeans like they were tissue and shredded the knee underneath. Great waves of blood started pulsing out of it before the kid could even react.

We’d never spoken, but the second after he hit the ground I was moving. I grabbed this stained, greasy towel off the hood of one of the beaters in the driveway and ran over to him. His eyes were wide in pain and alarm, darting over my body, lingering on the tattoos that showed, my first two. He seemed to decide I was okay because, eyes filling with tears he was too stubborn to shed, he opened the defensive cage of his scraped, bloody hands to let me at his knee. He scowled at me while I wrapped the towel around it, scrubbing at his eyes with the palm of his hand, leaving tiny red smears of blood behind.

“You play the guitar,” he informed me, saying it like it was a challenge. “You’re better than your band. I’ve seen you guys play.”

The filthy towel was as close to a bandage as it would ever be, so I rocked back on my heels, not leaving. “You should press on it,” I told him, feeling like the biggest idiot on the planet. The kid had to be fifteen years old, and I couldn’t tear my eyes off him. Forging on awkwardly, I said, “You’re Mark Stopholese’s friend, right?”

He nodded jerkily, peeling the towel away from his cut-up knee and inspecting the wound. He took a sharp, shuddery breath when the cool air hit his torn skin. He looked close to tears again so I kept talking, trying to distract and comfort him at once. “In my professional opinion, you will live to skate again.”

“A guitar-playing doctor,” he said, the side of his mouth tugging upwards and his eyes just beginning to crinkle at the edges. It was the first time I ever saw him smile.

“Dr. Sick Beats,” I suggested. “No, wait, I can do better! Dr. Shredder. Dr. Chops.”

“The Lick Doctor,” he said, grinning now.

“ _That_ probably carries some unintended connotations,” I said, pointing at him as I spoke. He gave a small laugh and then we just stared at each other for a minute or so, me grinning like an idiot with his blood all over my hands.

I was aware of a thousand things at once—the sun filtering through tree leaves, the muffled thumping bassline from the house, the feel of my cheeks from holding a smile, the coppery taste of the air, the gentleness and heat in his brown eyes.

“I’m Dave,” he said, looking up with wet eyes through improbably dark lashes.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” I said, a mix of stupid and cool. “My friends call me Dr. Lick.”

*

That’s the story of how we met. The kiss was inevitable, I think, once we had. Maybe some of his blood got into me, got into my system, confused my heart. Dragged me towards him.  



	4. Chapter 4

That’s the story of how we met. The kiss was inevitable, I think, once we had. Maybe some of his blood got into me, got into my system, confused my heart. Dragged me towards him.

After that I started to notice him around school, small and tough like a badger. He was fifteen and fresh out of Catholic school. He’d pierced his ears himself, at home, and was growing his hair into this scraggly forelock. He colored in his fingernails with permanent marker and walked around with this look on his face like he’d tear you apart if you made a sound that even resembled a laugh. But it was the softness in him, that flickered around the edges like a golden haze, that sometimes showed at the corner of his mouth, the furrow of his brow, an unguarded flash in his eyes—that was what I watched for. The softness in him was the first thing I fell in love with, and always what I treasured most.

It was November. It was after a show. We hadn’t gone together but we both ended up there. My band opened. I saw him, moving in the crowd like a thing pushed by the tides, like he was in a trance. He was the only person in the world who could make moshing look serene. Watching him made me feel nervous and excited at once, like my guts were tying themselves into decorative bows. My fingers sizzled and sparked, electric, as they slid through chords; I had never played better. The makeshift stage throbbed beneath my feet, the crowd bellowing around me, Dave bobbing in and out of my line of sight, my band thick and loud around me. I felt like I had taken the world in through my skin and would burst if another thing so much as brushed against me. I felt like I would explode into scalding, molten stars.

Our set ended before I was half through burning. I hit the floor like my life depended on it and threw myself into the hot mass of people. When the next band started I fell into it, ravenous, devouring not the music but the sound, its physical proximity, the intensity of bodies and noise and vibrations and screaming.

I didn’t look for Dave. I didn’t need to. The crowd was small and we were drawn to its center like magnets, pushed together and then repelled, circling. In the changing light his eyes glinted, dark and smoky, his face glittering with pinpoints of light and sweat. I could _feel_ the negative space between our bodies, the give and take of it. My whole body ached and tingled, sweaty, sore.

My awareness of him was not perfect, my heart not yet a keenly honed compass with its needle ever sensitive to his path. To me the magic of that night belonged to me, to the band, to the drunk buzzing air. I didn’t know that what I was feeling was _him_ , that godhood was what Davey did to me, that the effect he could have on me was staggering, like being pulled out of orbit, half a second out of sync with time, just one blurry step out of line with the universe. We had only spoken once or twice since we’d met: at the house, when he’d shown me some funny lyrics about cereal; at school when I had sailed up to his cafeteria table to make a dumb joke; when we passed in the hallway and exchanged eye contact. I knew almost nothing about him. He knew even less about me.

So I lost him. In the earsplitting silence after the show, the crowd ebbed. My girlfriend found me, told me she was going home with one of her friends; the way she kissed me goodbye, plunging and brief, left me shaky and raw, ragged at the edges. My lips felt bitten, bee-stung. I did not think to question my own motives when I ran into Dave, offered him a ride home.

I leaned over, unlocked the passenger door. He slipped from the cold of the parking lot into the cold of my dad’s Chevelle. We sat in silence for most of the drive. I was restless, the highway stretching infinite, breathing November air and feeling terribly alive. My teeth buzzed, my eyes burned, the afterecho of the show subbing in for my heartbeat. It wasn’t a bad silence. It contributed to the unreality of the night, satin on my skin, thick and strange.

When we hit the Ukiah town limit, Dave found his voice. “You know that whole thing about getting into cars with strangers?” he asked. To match the long quiet, he spoke softly. “It occurs to me that I never asked your name.”

The pleasure I felt seemed disproportionate to the situation, vastly in excess of what was normal to feel. “It’s Jade,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he surprised me by saying. His mouth was curled into a perfect smile. “It’s just that I never asked _you_.”

“Do you want to go home?” I heard myself ask suddenly. “I feel like I could do anything, right now. Like I could just keep driving.”

“Where would we go?”

“Wherever you wanted.”

He didn’t hesitate. “You know Low Gap? The park across the street from the high school?” I nodded. “I want to go there,” Davey said.

It wasn’t what I had had in mind. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Mexico, maybe. Or that we’d keep driving forever, leaving a burning swath of used-up universe behind us, a black scar across the stars. But Dave wanted Low Gap, so that’s where we went.

He was out of the car the moment the engine shut off. He shot off into the dark, looking back over his shoulder to call “Come on!”, the light of the moon turning his grin to silver. I followed, stumbling over uneven ground. It was dark, cold. My breath fogged in the air. I hurried, trying to catch up.

Then the ground dropped away. Suddenly I was sliding off the edge of the earth. An undignified yelp left my mouth and I scrabbled at rocks and dirt, tearing my fingernails, ripping my calluses. I landed on my ass, gasping to breathe, at the bottom of a gulch. Davey stood over me, his hands shoved in the pocket of his hoodie, smirking. “Graceful.”

He reached down to help me up. I took his hand and pulled; he tumbled down on top of me. His forehead hit my chin as he fell. “Graceful,” I shot back, hand smarting as if burned by his touch.

I got up, brushed some of the dirt off my jeans, and followed him along the bottom of the gulch. We wove between skinny trees, trudged through coarse patches of chaparral, splashed through icy puddles. “Where are you taking me?”

I heard the waterfall before I saw it. We stood in front of it for a few minutes, breathing hard in the dark, letting its spray hit our faces, soaking the toes of our shoes. I might have stayed there all night had he not reached out and taken my hand, given it a tug. “This isn’t it,” he said, his voice laughing. His palm was cool to the touch. I hadn’t seen a clock since we were in the car, but I guessed we were nearing midnight. My calves hurt from walking over uneven ground. The close buzz of the concert was starting to wear off. Instead of immortal, I began to feel hungry.

But he could have led me off a cliff and I would still have gone where that hand wanted. Dave kept pulling, and I kept following. We began to climb.

I don’t know how long we walked. He let go of my hand eventually, because it was steep going up the foothill, and you needed your hands to catch yourself if you fell. I didn’t think of complaining. I had been to the lake, poked around some of the caves when I was kid, had class picnics at Low Gap. I’d hiked some of the trails and brought my siblings here to play. I’d never done this, though. We wound through the under- and overgrowth, no trail in sight, the stars winking on and off above our heads.

Finally, Davey stopped. We had come suddenly to a clearing, at the crest of the ridge we’d been scaling the face of. We were high up, higher than I’d realized. The whole valley stretched out open and twinkling below us, cast in pools of illumination and shadow. The buildings were small enough to cradle in the palm of your hand. The wind blew harder up here in the open, rocking against us. I heard myself laugh aloud.

Dave turned to me, face lit up with a grin. “This is my favorite place in the world,” he told me. With the town nothing but a constellation behind him, just him and me on the peak of the world, I was astonished to realize how beautiful he was. How intoxicating. Looking at him then, my heart thundered and my lungs shuddered the same as they had up on stage. I felt strange, not myself. Better than myself.

I took a step closer, the line of my body fitting up neatly against him. His lovely pointed chin fitted easily into my hand. I tilted his face towards mine and he stared, hungry and wild and frightened, into my eyes. I hesitated, searching his face for a sign that he wanted this. He blinked slow as glass, his breath a small and trembling thing. His eyes were dark pits in the night, drawing everything in. I could feel his pulse in his throat, under my thumb. I thought I was frozen there, unable to move either closer or away, until a whimper parted his lips, vibrating in his neck. I felt it, heard it, small and pleading. After that there was nothing on earth that could stop me. Gravity collapsed down to a single pinprick and I fell, straight into the depths of him.

I kissed him clumsily, my cool lips crashing against his, my free hand going to the small of his back and pressing him into me. He made another sound, a whimper or a moan, and I swallowed it. He kissed me back, shyly, his tongue darting out to brush against my lips and then in again. He opened his mouth beneath the pressure of mine and our tongues met with surprising heat, after the cold air. Once opened he spilled out of himself: he kissed back with sudden fervor, pressing back into my mouth, urgent, demanding. His small hands fastened to my waist, anchored to my belt loops. My hand swept past his chin, along his neck, into his short hair. I had never wanted anything so much in my life as I wanted him then. It felt like he was a part of me that I hadn’t known was missing, like we could melt together again and be whole. He bit my lip in his hurried earnest and pulled back, breathing hard, when the sharp taste of blood bloomed between us.

“God,” I whisper-moaned, following his mouth with mine, not willing to be parted even for a second. If given the choice I would have gladly forgone breathing and asphyxiated, lips locked, giving myself over to him. But he pulled back roughly, releasing me, stumbling away from my hands as if frightened. He stared at me with a look I couldn’t read, his face blooming into horror, terror, hurt. The pretty planes of his cheekbones crumpled suddenly, and he spun away from me at a run, surging down the ridge the way we’d come. Crying.

“Dave, wait,” I tried to call after him, but my voice was hoarse and weak, like the rest of me. “Wait,” I called again. There was no response, just the sound of him crashing away through the brush, muffling the sound his tears. “I’m sorry!” I yelled as loudly as I could, echoing terribly against the rock. Then I went after him.

I didn’t know what I’d do if I caught up to him. At first I ran at a stupid, breakneck pace, trying to gain on him with my longer legs. But I didn’t know the terrain, and the length of my limbs made them clumsy. I slowed after a while, trying then just to keep up. I didn’t know the way back, so I didn’t let him get so far ahead that I couldn’t hear him, couldn’t follow; but I stopped pursuing him. I stopped calling. He knew I was there, behind him. If he’d wanted me to catch up, he’d have let me.

The longer I trudged after him, the more the panic dulled and I came back to myself. I wondered what I’d done, and why. I wondered how I would ever apologize. I wondered what it meant about me. I remembered, for the first time in years, what had happened with Ethan. Was I gay? I’d kissed three girls and two boys. I didn’t consider that anything went into it other than numbers, that I might have a say in what I was and what I wanted. I just furiously tallied it up, over and over. I _liked_ fooling around with Taryn; I liked the way kissing her made me feel; I liked the low tension at the very bottom of my stomach when she rubbed thumb over my knuckles, when she whispered in my ear. But if I liked those things, why I had I done this? _What the hell had I done?_

He was waiting by the car when I clawed my way up out of the gulch, rubbing at pink puffy cheeks with the sodden sleeves of his hoodie. His nose was running, maybe from the cold. He was shivering. “I’m sorry,” I muttered, not meeting his eyes, feeling twin rushes of nausea and relief to see him.

“I’m going to go to hell,” he said hollowly, sniffling. I had no rejoinder. It felt like I was already there. I got into my dad’s car, unlocked his door, started the engine. I stared tight-jawed at the steering wheel in front of me.

The tires crunched on gravel as I pulled out onto Low Gap Road. “I don’t know where you live,” I told him, as embarrassed by that as by anything. He parceled out directions in two-word chunks as needed, his voice a monotone, telling nothing. The silence was punctuated by occasional sniffles. I was torn between wanting to vomit and wanting to die.

When I pulled into his driveway at last, I turned off the car and the headlights. For a few minutes we sat in silence. I wrestled with myself in agony, trying to think of anything I could say that would communicate my sorrow, my regret. My filthy gratitude. I felt as if I had taken something from him, something precious, and broken it. I didn’t even know how to give back the pieces of whatever it was.

Finally he opened the car door and got out. He slammed it shut and I tried to decipher the meaning of that, if he had in anger used unusual force, if the sound had seemed louder than it really was after so much silence.

I waited until he was inside, just in case he looked back. I didn’t come up with the magic word that would undo everything I’d done, so instead I watched him walk away. Once he was gone I started the car again, put it into reverse, and pulled out. In a fugue of numbness, I navigated the streets to my dad’s house, where I stayed some weekends. I parked his car in the driveway but couldn’t bring myself to get out. Eventually my fatigue overtook me. I stretched out as well as I could in the front seat, spooning with the gearshift, and went to sleep.

*

That time, people found out.  



	5. Chapter 5

That time, people found out.

I saw Davey a few days later, passing in the school corridor. He had a black eye and a split lip and the deep mournfulness of someone who thinks they deserve it. My whole body lurched at the sight of it, the intrapsychic equivalent of thinking there’s one more step at the bottom of the staircase than there actually is, and I wanted to scream and cry and apologize. I wanted to brush my fingertips over the tender swollen surface of his wounds. I wanted to ask who did it, either so I could thrash them or avoid them I wasn’t sure. And I knew that whoever had done this to him had found out somehow. That they weren’t likely to keep quiet about it.

That soon everyone would know.

We passed in the hallway. I said nothing.

By the end of the week the entire school knew what had happened, or some version of it. I was in three fights in two days. On Thursday I slammed Aaron Park against a locker, choking him with my forearm, and threatened him with all the worst things I could think of after he asked me, loudly, if I’d sucked any good cock lately. Later that day, a bulky football player shoved me during a passing period, bellowing “Keep your faggy hands off me, Puget.” I landed a single punch before one of his linebacker buddies locked my arms behind my back and held me there while Eddie pummeled me in the gut. I showed him my teeth, hissing in pain, and told him how fine and tight his ass looked in his football pants.

On Friday a group of guys came up behind me in the locker room before gym and thrashed me so thoroughly I lay on the cement floor, bleeding and crippled by pain, until the janitor found me and helped me to the nurse’s office. I never saw any of their faces. I was propped up in a chair in the principal’s office, holding ice against my face and receiving worried frowns from the secretary, when Taryn broke up with me. She couldn’t keep the disgust off her face, out of her voice. She took in my cuts and bruises and chipped front tooth like they were hard evidence about my nature. “Did you really fuck some freshman guy in the woods this weekend?” she asked. It didn’t sound like a question.

“Come on, Tare, you know I didn’t,” I told her, wondering at the smoothness of the words as they left my mouth. I was lying and telling the truth at once. I had not fucked Dave in the woods, but I had kissed him; how was she, or anyone, to know what I was liable to do and not do? I relished the consistent pain in my body as if, with application of enough brutality, whatever part of me that had kissed Davey and liked it could be extinguished. As if I could bleed out the treacherous impulse and everything it meant. I was a monster and deserved to be run out of town by villagers with torches and pitchforks.

Taryn bit her lip, wrung the strap of her backpack in her hands, blinked tears at the linoleum floor. “I _don’t_ know, Jade. That’s the problem.” She paused. “Where did you go, Friday after the show? You never showed up at Elisa’s party.”

More and more, silence seemed like the safest answer. After a minute or so Taryn shook her head, tears spilling over now, voice shaking. “I think it’s best if we just… cool it for a while. Maybe after all this shit blows over, we can… be friends or something.” She stared bravely into my eyes, looking proud and strong and beautiful. I could hear in her voice she was close to tears; she always cried when she was angry. My heart ached. “I, uh, I really care about you. Please be careful. If they catch you alone, they really might kill you.”

*

I didn’t want to go home. I couldn’t stomach the idea of my mom’s eyes filling with tears when she saw the cuts and bruises. How would I answer, when she asked what had happened?


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I don't own the boys but it's statistically pretty likely that this happened."

I didn’t want to go home. I couldn’t stomach the idea of my mom’s eyes filling with tears when she saw the cuts and bruises. How would I answer, when she asked what had happened? My brother Smith was a sophomore at Ukiah High—how long before he heard? Had he heard already?

I couldn’t bear it. I waited in the principal’s office until they made me leave. “If you make me go, I’ll just get jumped again,” I told the secretary around an exponentially swelling lip. She let me stay until she was done with the day’s work and campus was mostly empty. I put my head down and my hood up and trudged to my dad’s house, trying to look like anyone else.

No one bothered me on my walk. I was almost heartened by this, though most of my body ached, stung, or burned, though my head was throbbing and the stabbing knots in my back and gut promised I’d be pissing blood. I rang Dad’s doorbell to give him some warning, and let myself in with my key.

I stepped into the foyer as he reached the top of the stairs. He frowned down, looming above me, and I felt weary and small. All the tears I hadn’t shed burned at the corners of my eyes, looking up at him, feeling like I was five years old again, like I’d fallen off my bike and he could make it better. “Hey, Dad.” My voice trembled to my own ears, thick as it was with sorrow and gratitude. My battered body absorbed his stare as he took inventory of my injuries. “Can I crash here tonight?”

I expected—I don’t know what I expected. Comfort and care, I guess. He’d never taken issue with fighting, had always encouraged us to defend ourselves and give worse than we got. Maybe I thought he’d hug me or put a raw steak on my face or give me a beer and invite me to watch the game.

Instead of any of that, he stayed where he was, suddenly ominous. “Looks like you took a beating,” he said. There a quality to his voice I didn’t recognize—stiff, defensive, almost threatening.

I gave him a painful half-smile. I became aware of my heart pounding in my chest. I waited.

He crossed his arms across his chest and came down a few steps, stopping again when he was halfway down. He frowned down on me, his eyes shadowed. “I think I know why,” he told me, and the air left my lungs. “I’ve heard some rumors about your troubles. There are some folks who took a great deal of pleasure in making sure I heard them. Do you know what they’re saying about you?”

I took a step back, my stomach filled with ice, my gorge rising. I felt panicky and trapped.

He came the rest of the way down the stairs. Now that we were standing face-to-face I remembered how tall he was, how broad across the chest. How physically imposing. “Is it true? Your tight pants and your make-up and your fucking jewelry, that wasn’t enough? You screw little boys, now, too?” Being surrounded, being beaten from all sides, being kicked and pummeled and punched by an innumerable group of guys—that had hurt so much less. “I won’t have—I won’t have a faggot for a son. Do you understand me?”

I opened my mouth as if there was anything I could say that would make a difference. That would undo any of this. My face was wet with stinging tears. The worst part was the look on my dad’s face, like I was hurting him, like I was causing _him_ pain. Like I had made myself into something he could not love, and it was killing him. “If it’s true,” he said, his voice tight and quiet and shaking with rage and regret and pain, his whole body taut like a thing is just before it’s pulled too far and it snaps, “if even a word of it is true, you get the hell out of my house. Leave your fucking key. I don’t ever want to see your face again if it’s true.”

“Dad,” I said stupidly, helplessly, crying. “Dad.”

“Mikey Marchand told me you went after his boy, did queer things to him.” My father’s jaw set tight, spitting through his teeth in his anger and disgust. “And I’m just supposed to let you stay here? Let you near Gibson—near my son?” Finally his voice broke and he choked on tears of his own. He spat his grief at me as if it would burn, as if it was acid. “Get out,” he growled, eyes wet, fists clenched. “Get the fuck out. Don’t come here again. I mean it. If you come back here, I will make you regret it. I will make us both regret it.”

I was shaking too badly to get his house key off my key ring so I dropped the whole thing at his feet. _I didn’t do anything wrong_. I was dying to say it, to shout it, to mean it. _It was all a lie. I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t._ But I couldn’t. So I dropped my keys at his feet and stumbled blindly out of his house, away from his family and his loathing. Crying, hurt, my whole heart broken, I broke into a run, as if by putting distance between myself and his house I could escape what had happened. His words echoed in my head, damning. Dave had told his own dad; Dave had told everyone. I had—I had attacked him, forced myself on him, done something disgusting and unforgiveable.

I decided I would suffer for it. I was already suffering for it. But I could do worse, could hurt harder. I would tear myself down and burn the pieces. Maybe if I bled enough, if I was beaten enough, if I suffered and I meant it, I could eradicate this thing in me. I could destroy it. I could be cured.

I could remake myself and bury it deep.

*

I dropped out of high school a few weeks later, the day I turned eighteen.


	7. Chapter 7

I dropped out of high school a few weeks later, the day I turned eighteen. Before or since, I have never seen my mother so angry about anything. The morning of my eighteenth birthday, I told her I wasn’t going back. She yelled and cried and pleaded, threatened and begged. She told me she was worried about me, that I wasn’t acting like myself. She asked if it had something to do with the fight I’d had with my dad, or the fight I’d had at school. _Tell me what’s wrong, baby, and I can help you!_ she pleaded. _Are you in trouble? What’s happening to you?_ I wouldn’t tell her anything. Solemn-faced, Smith stared at me across the kitchen table. He didn’t tell her anything either.

I got a job at a golf course, which seemed the unlikeliest place to run into anyone I knew. Suddenly wealthy, I bought a car, a 1980 Chevy Caprice with a soft-top, which seemed the perfect emblem of the reckless teenage wasteland I believed myself to be living in. I kept whatever hours I pleased. I stayed up later and later, trying to time my day so that I was either asleep or away when Mom was at home, to avoid seeing the crushing weight of concern on her otherwise pretty face. It was hard to practice the guitar at 4am in most neighborhoods, though, so I started crashing at the punk house more nights than not. I only ever took shit once there, off some asshole from Ukiah High. Smith held his arms back while I broke his nose, splitting my first open in his face. No one bothered me there again.

That spring brought with it a slew of acceptance letters from various colleges. My SAT was high enough that UCLA still wanted me when they found out I had no intention of receiving a high school diploma, provided I complete a summer session prior to enrollment. Much to my mother’s delight, I accepted. It was like someone had unbound my ribs, loosened my chest, undone a knot that had been snug at my throat. Knowing that I was leaving soon, that it was all temporary anyway, made it possible to go on.

Weeks and then months went by without my seeing Dave, or my dad, or my half-siblings. Smith sometimes brought back reports of Lish or Gibs asking after me, or missing me, or doing something stupid and wonderful, something that I’d have loved. I never sent word back.

The night before I left for college, Mom took Smith and me to Jyun Kang, a vegan place in the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. It had been our favorite place to eat since we were kids. We used to talk endlessly about joining the monastery, shaving our heads, becoming kung fu masters. No matter how many times Mom brought us, we never really got Buddhism.

Although it was meant to be a celebration, everything fond and familiar about the restaurant chafed that night. Instead of feeling happy I felt scraped out, utterly hollow, false. Jyun Kang only threw into sharper contrast how badly I fit into my own life. I was a monster, remember. A pervert. A predator. I flinched from the sight of my own reflection.

It was worse for Mom. She looked tired and sad even as she smiled, toasting to my future. I hadn’t told her about what had happened, so I had no way of knowing what she’d heard, what she thought she knew. I knew she'd be glad to see me go; I knew that I was breaking her heart.

After dinner, Smith asked me to take him out driving. With my help, he’d logged nearly enough hours for his license. I knew exactly what I owed him. He had lied for me, kept silent for me, bloodied his knuckles for me—stood by my side without question. I had run away but he had gone to school every day, facing it. Mysterious benefactors wrote crude messages on his locker door; two of his skateboards had been snapped that semester. He had never complained. It didn’t seem to matter to him: I was his brother, and that was enough.

I didn't realize where we were going that night until he pulled onto Low Gap Road.

I had been turning increasingly to silence to deal with the things I didn't know how to say. True to form, I said nothing. Smith parked the car and got out. I knew I had to follow. He lay back on the hood, staring up at the smoggy stars, and patted the spot next to him. Once I was settled he started to speak.

“I've heard a version of what happened here from everyone but you,” he said calmly, his signature smirk audible even in his most serious of voices. “Even Dad. Some of it is obviously bullshit, but you wouldn't be acting like this if some of it wasn’t true.” I bit my lip ‘til I tasted blood, and then bit harder.

“No comment?” my brother asked. “Okay, then I'll go. If at any point you want to correct me, you feel free to jump in.” He took a breath and I willed myself to disappear. “What you’re doing—this whole high school drop-out drifter-ghost thing—that’s you punishing yourself, right? So you must have done something you feel guilty about. Not regular-strength guilt but full-blown _Catholic_ guilt. This is you hating yourself. This is what you look like broken. So I figure you think you hurt somebody. Am I on track so far?” Smith paused, to give me a chance to interject. I did not.

“Okay. So you think you hurt somebody pretty bad, I’m guessing. The entire _world_ knows you took Dave Marchand here, that night in November. Some people say it was a stranger-danger thing, like you had nefarious intentions from the start. Other people say he was in on it too, and you guys were looking for someplace to fuck.” I flinched away from the word, and Smith noticed it. When he spoke again I could hear him frowning. “Yeah, I didn’t think that sounded right, either. I mean, you really liked Taryn, so I don’t see you setting out on purpose to hurt her. So what do we know?”

He turned to me, propping himself up on my windshield with his elbow, his eyes boring into me like fucking x-ray vision. “We know you and Davey Marchand were here, together, last November.” He ticked his pieces of evidence off on his fingers. “We know that you weren’t planning whatever happened. And we know that whatever happened, he liked it, too.”

As was his intention from the start, that line got my attention. I jerked my head around to stare back at him. Smith raised his eyebrows, looking entirely too satisfied. “So what I’ve put together out of all the rumors and the bullshit is that neither of you did anything especially interesting or scandalous, and everyone who goes to our high school is a total shithead. I’m right, aren’t I?”

I broke my silence at last. “What do you mean, he liked it too?”

Grinning, Smith said, “I told you I heard everyone’s version but yours, J. I don’t care what the true version is. I don’t think it’s anyone’s fucking business, all right? But I see you walking around like the boy with the thorn in his side and, from what I’ve heard, you haven’t done anything wrong. Haven’t done anything… anybody didn’t want you to.”

It was like I’d been holding my breath for six months. Oxygen exploded in my veins, stars bursting behind my eyes, and I wanted to laugh and cry and sing and scream. I saw two kaleidoscoping truths: one in which Smith was wrong, because I had done so much wrong; I had made my father hate me, earned beatings for myself, my brother, for Dave; I had made Davey cry, had made him run from me, had made him choke out from around his tears that he was going to hell. I had hurt Taryn and I had swung my fists at more deserving bastards than I cared to count. I had done damage, and there was no erasing that truth. But there was a second truth, one in which Smith was right: one in which I hadn’t taken or broken anything, hadn’t taken advantage, hadn’t sullied a boy’s honor or forced myself on him. A truth in which we had different ways of punishing ourselves, different styles of reacting badly, but had maybe for a moment wanted the same thing. Even if the thing we’d wanted was accursed, depraved, legally and morally wrong.

Tears were leaking out the corner of my eyes, but there were tears of relief. For the first time in months I felt like I had some weight to me, some substance; like I was at least a sliver of myself.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,” I told my little brother, and I meant it.

*

The third time I kissed a man brought everything crashing down.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: If there's discretion that you'd not abandoned, now's the time.


	8. Chapter 8

The third time I kissed a man brought everything crashing down.

It was my junior year of college and I was doing well. I had friends, a pretty good band, shows almost every weekend. I was on the honor roll, was involved in departmental research, had an on-again off-again girlfriend. I hadn’t seen Dave in a couple of years and hadn’t thought about him in nearly as long. I had forgiven myself. I believed I was healed.

My dad had forgiven me too, or at least chosen to forget. That summer he’d taken Smith and me on vacation with his family, left me alone with Gibson a few times. He called me once a month or so, asked if I was doing well, if I needed anything. He’d even asked me what I wanted for my birthday. And if he didn’t quite meet my eyes anymore, if he didn’t quite treat me the same way he used to—I could attribute that to the awkwardness of the phone, the physical distance, the infrequency of our visits. I could attribute that to the natural rupture that comes with growing up.

Any way you measured it, I was thriving. I carefully and thoroughly monitored the content of my thoughts, my dreams, for anything out of place or unnatural. I did this automatically after a few years of practice—eradicated unwanted impulses without a thought. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you everyone did this. Everyone systematically destroyed thoughts and feelings and physical sensations that were inconsistent with how they needed to think of themselves. Everyone wanted forbidden things with a choking, overpowering intensity sometimes; they just never talked about it.

I might have gone on forever, believing it. I might even have been happy that way.

I kissed my favorite sociology professor instead.

Professor Magnus Lark was a 30 year-old Danish PhD whose accent got stronger as his lectures grew more impassioned; whose tweed pants were impeccably tailored over a truly remarkable ass, and always coordinated to his Italian shoes; who rolled up his sleeves and loosened his tie and shoved his bangs out of his eyes over and over again throughout his class periods. If I had allowed myself, I’d have found him cuttingly handsome. Instead I believed myself in awe of his intellect, his fervor, his charm. I believed that I was smitten with sociology, and switched my major after my first week of my first class with him.

I went to his office hours regularly. He asked me to join his research team. We started seeing each other constantly: in class, in his office, over coffee, over dinner. He praised my insights, my ideas, my writing. He suggested I undertake a senior thesis project, which he was all too happy to advise. One night in October he even came to one of my shows.

It didn’t occur to me—I didn’t allow myself to notice—that it was a courtship. Even when we spoke on the phone late into the night, when he laughed like terrible soc joke I made was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, when he asked me to sit in the front row of his class so it was easier to solicit my opinions. Enthusiastically he encouraged me to continue on to graduate school, even suggesting I could move into his house while I pursued a master’s degree. I assumed he meant I could rent a room. I assumed—well. I was a damn fool. I didn’t notice because I didn’t want to notice. If I’d admitted our relationship was unusual, I’d have had to stop.

I didn’t want to stop.

Over Thanksgiving, Magnus called me at my mom’s house. He asked me rather formally if I would consent to spending my 21st birthday with him. He would make me an extravagant dinner, he promised. There would be more wine than I could drink. We could listen to whatever noisy records I chose.

When I got off the phone, cheeks flushed and a particularly telling smile on my face, Smith was grinning at me. “That must have been Heidi,” he said. “You, brother, are smiling the smile of a guy about to get some.”

That should have been a sobering moment for me. A warning sign.

It was not.

Instead, I made halfhearted excuses to my friends, my band, my sometimes-girlfriend, and I spent my birthday with Magnus. It was where I wanted to be, even if I couldn’t admit to myself why. He served me richly spiced Indian food, much of which we ate with our hands. My throat burned from the food’s heat so I drank glass after glass of wine. In velvet tones, frequently punctured by delighted laughter, Magnus kept up a stream of compliments and conversation. I sank into a warm, rosy dream, as if the whole world were lit by candlelight. As if I was totally at peace and perfectly happy. I was thinking only of my own pleasure and contentment at being favored by such an intelligent, interesting human. If Magnus thought I should, I realized, I’d apply to the master’s program next year. I imagined what it would be like, living here, and felt a thrill of excitement light up my skin. I was drunker than I’d thought, than I’d meant, but instead of causing alarm this made me giggle. My professor’s intelligent brown eyes regarded my fondly and I told him, “I’m glad I met you, Dr. Lark.”

He murmured something in Danish, near my ear. I opened my mouth to ask him to repeat it and he caught my question with a kiss. I had drunk enough to forget, for a moment, what I was supposed to be guarding against; I kissed back. One of Magnus’s hands slid up the back of my neck, tangling in my short hair, and he moved his body forward onto mine, pressing me back into the couch. I melted into his touch, our bodies molding together as if they were designed to, and touched the edge of brilliant, sunrise ecstasy. Then I came back to myself. I remembered.

“No!” The protest burst out of my mouth, surprising us both. Magnus sprang back as if it had hit him with physical force. “I’m not _gay_ ,” I said, and Magnus had the decency to pretend he couldn’t feel the lie of it through my jeans. “I don’t—I didn’t mean—I thought you liked me because I was good at sociology.”

I heard myself as if from a great distance, the petulant voice of a child, complaining that the fantastic new bicycle he’s been given is the wrong color. The color was draining out of Magnus’s face, the confusion creasing his dear brow being replaced by horror at what he’d done. He had more to lose than I did. All of the moments we’d shared together rushed over me in waves. He’d had so much at stake; he’d been careful. He’d made _very_ sure that this was what I wanted. He’d pursued me slowly, over the course of two semesters, pushed his way into my life a tentative inch at a time, giving me room to refuse or push back at every juncture. I realized how I’d been staring at him just a moment before, spread out on his couch, eyes half-lidded and lazy, drunk and purring _I’m glad I met you_.

It was easy to believe that there was something monstrous inside me. A demon—a sickness. Something depraved that made me act this way, when I was so sure that this wasn’t who I was, this wasn’t what I wanted. “I don’t want this,” I said, trying to convince one of us. “This isn’t who I am.”

“Then who are you, _min kære_?” asked Magnus. He was standing well away from me now, and had begun to pace, holding his forehead in his hands, grey-faced and growing agitated. “Maybe not who either of us thought you to be!” He turned to face me, his expression frozen somewhere between nauseous and livid. “What _do_ you want?” he asked helplessly, half accusation and half despair. “If you do not want me—if that is not ‘who you are’—why did you come here at all?”

I barely made it out of Magnus’s living room before I came apart. I had no answer. I opened my mouth and there was nothing on my tongue but ash. I was there because—because—I was there because, even with everything in my life going so well, even with everything thriving, even with everything sick and twisted and wrong firmly buried and behind me—I _still_ wanted him.

Everything I had, everything I had worked for, everything good in my life. It was all nothing, or at least it was all less than a single evening with Magnus, a single stupid kiss.

I threw up on Magnus’s front porch, as if I could vomit out everything black and terrible inside me, as if what I felt was a deep and stinking rot that I could scrape out and leave behind. I threw up, bent double, on my knees and retching until there was only bile on my chin, and still I coughed and heaved, arching my back like a cat, as if there was still anything left inside of me that I could be purged of.

Because he was a good man with a good heart, eventually Magnus came out to me. I don’t know how long he listened to me retch and vomit and moan before he came to my aid. He wiped my face and my hands gently, with a soft towel. He helped me up, through a combination of carrying and dragging got me inside. He put me in his own bed with a cool cloth on my forehead and pressed ice cubes against my lips when I would not drink, slipped crackers between my teeth when I would not eat. He stayed up all night, taking care of the man who rejected him by vomiting prodigiously all over his doorstep, letting me cry and moan into his own pillowcase, under circumstances very different from those under which he’d probably imagined inviting me into his bed.

He must have slept on the couch. I woke up hungover and miserable and alone. Worse, though, I woke up still me. I woke up having no idea what to do or who to be. Like a sick, gnawed hole in the bottom of my gut, there crouched a terrible sinking truth, a thing I knew about myself but could not possibly own, a thing that I had been running from for years without being able to say why. It wasn’t a thing you could just sleep off. It was a deep brokenness. It was me, left in pieces, with no idea how to rebuild.

*

It was not the most perfect time in my life to run into Davey.  



	9. Chapter 9

It was not the most perfect time in my life to run into Davey.

Over winter break Smith took me to a show. It was in a derelict warehouse, played by bunch of local East Bay punk bands, largely populated by kids he either knew or emulated. There was no read headliner, just a lot of rising stars showcasing raw, unpolished talent. Dancing in the pit was good, but it made me ache to lay my fingers on strings, to be the one up there. The only piece of me I was certain of, that I trusted to bear weight, was the part that came online when I picked up a guitar.

Watching me jitter, Smith grabbed my arm between sets and dragged me over to where the next band was setting up. “I know these guys,” he bellowed into my ear. “Remember Mark from UHS?” Before I could shout anything back Smith had accosted the band members. By the time I processed their exchange, Mark, who I did remember, was pressing a spare guitar into my hands, grinning, and pushing me onto the riser ahead of him.

“I don’t know any of your songs,” I called back over my shoulder, making no attempt to resist or unhand his battered old axe.

“You’re about to learn!” Mark shouted. There was no time left to resist. Any further banter was drowned out by the shriek of the lead singer’s mic kicking on.

He screamed: “Joined tonight by the honorable Jade Puget of Loose Change, Doctor of Face-Melting Riffs, we are AFI!”

And that’s how I found myself onstage with the earliest incarnation of Davey Havok, wearing eyeliner, leather pants, and grinning like a jack-o-lantern. There was nothing I could do but pretend I was a man in control of my own life, and play.

*

Carried offstage by the heat and sound of the crowd, I became aware again of the ground beneath my feet, the molten strings beneath my touch, the exhilarated grin on my face.

It was a sweaty, tousled, and hoarse Dave who clapped me on the back with the rest of the band. “That was excellent,” he informed me, beaming, as if there had been no traumatic kiss or years of bruising silence. I wondered if he could have possibly forgotten—could somehow have thoughtlessly recovered from the events that had destroyed and then defined me. I wondered if the power we had generated on stage, me first following and then leading their less experienced guitarist, had buried any awkwardness between us. Had burned it to ash. “I can’t believe we sounded that good. I’ve always wanted to sound that good.”

“Thanks a lot,” Mark said morosely, unplugging his equipment and stuffing it into cases. “He’s never even _heard_ our songs before and somehow he plays them better than me.”

“I’ve probably just been playing longer than you have. I started young.” I shrugged awkwardly. “If you ever want to play together I can give you some tips.”

Mark’s face flickered with annoyance, but Davey’s already glowing grin grew even brighter. “Oh man, that that would be incredible! You should come to our next practice.”

Inside my chest, my heart was doing things I could not begin to understand. “Yeah, definitely,” I replied casually, as if my every artery was not electrified, as if I was not currently composed of splitting atoms and celestial bursts. “I’ll be around.”

*

“Is that a convertible?” Dave asked, pointing at my Chevy that was parked at the end of the driveway. The answer was self-evident, so he didn’t wait for me to stammer something out. “You’re driving me home. Can we put the top down?”  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: Put the top down, use your knees to drive; I'll make it worth your while, just let me taste the sky.


	10. Chapter 10

“Is that a convertible?” Dave asked, pointing at my Chevy parked at the end of the driveway. The answer was self-evident, so he didn’t wait for me to stammer something out. “You’re driving me home. Can we put the top down?”

Against my better judgment, I had come to their band practice. I had spent the entire night suspended somewhere between panic and joy, undoing and becoming. The chords of their short, angry songs had been the only thing tethering me to reality. Now that I’d packed my guitar away, I was liable to drift out of orbit, to burn up in the atmosphere. “It’s December,” I said, because I couldn’t think of a way to fit my deep misgivings about driving Dave anywhere into words. We had a history of getting into cars together. We had a history of me driving him home. We had a history of it going badly.

Or maybe only I had a history. Davey was already waiting at the passenger door of the Caprice, as if he had no memory of what had gone before. If the consequences of that kiss had been any less cataclysmic, if the tremors hadn’t left stress lines and faults in the very bed of me, I might have believed I’d dreamed the whole thing. That’s how he was acting.

“I want to taste the sky,” Dave said, his mouth a sharp and devilish grin, enticing and damning in one, a spider that invites you in only to ensnare and feed upon you. I shuddered, because just _looking_ at his lips had a physical effect on me. Letting this boy into my car would be a tremendous mistake. One I had already made and, theoretically, learned from. “Feed me the stars,” he urged softly, in a voice both charming and dangerous. He was a siren. I wasn’t a sailor but a ship. Mere drowning was too swift, too merciful, to be an adequate metaphor for what he was going to do to me. He was going to draw me near, pull me under, and smash me to splinters and shards.

I knew better. I knew so much better.

I knew nothing.

I unlocked the passenger side door. He slid into the front seat and I set to work unfastening the roof of the car.

The winter California air was cool when you were standing in it; when it was whipping against your face at 50 miles an hour, it was like being stung with ice. My cheeks smarted, my eyes watered, my teeth chattered. The wind roared in my ears and ate up any other sound. The bowl of the sky hung open and silent above us, velvet black and flung with stars. The onrush of beauty and cold and sprawling heavens bordered on surreal, each breath burning in my lungs.

Quiet, dark roads rose and fell through hills and valleys. I felt cupped in the palms of something greater. Dave flung his head back and stared into the sky, bathed in moonlight so that he seemed to glow. His grin rushed skyward at a dizzying speed. I felt tethered to the earth by no more than a spiderweb. If the back of his hand so much as brushed mine, I’d be unmoored entirely. Even the weight of his eyes upon be might be too much—might cause me to burst at the seams, sickly sweet as an overripe fruit. Luckily he kept his eyes on trained on the sky, mirrors to its light. Compared to the heavens, his gaze was equally dark but infinitely warmer.

This time I didn’t need to ask for directions. The route to his house was mortified into the flesh of my memory. I drove there silently, not daring to do more than steal glances at him. _Him_. He appeared to have no idea how easy it would be to undo me. How little it would take to make me disintegrate.

Or maybe he was just being merciful. He was so young, that night. So soft and unshaped by cruelty, by what would come after. He still possessed untapped depths of mercy.

After what felt like a lifetime of traveling under the naked night sky, I pulled up to his driveway. I kept my car in the street, not able to face the way I knew my headlights would bounce off the garage door back at me. I kept my eyes facing straight ahead, on the stilled asphalt before me. In my peripheral, I saw him straighten up slowly, coming back from somewhere far away. Or, if not coming back, coming up for air.

“Thank you for the ride, Jade,” he said softly. He wasn’t grinning now. The still air was hard to breathe after rushing through so much night. My pulse thundered in place of the wind.

He waited for me to answer. I was too afraid of what I might say.

“Will you play with us again?” he asked after about ten seconds of impatient fidgeting.

In truth, I had very little else to do. No schoolwork, no job, and none of the work I’d planned to do for Magnus. But he scared me. _Me_ around him scared me. I already knew I was not to be trusted. He was a precarious ledge and I wanted to keep my distance, lest I fall.

Lest I long to fall.

“Sure, maybe,” I said vaguely, noncommittally, still staring straight ahead. Except for the cool air on my skin, this felt the same as the last time I’d idled in front of his house, just after my world had ended. More than anything I wanted him to get out of my car so I could safely return home. I was all too aware of how little privacy was afforded by the Caprice with the top down. Anyone could see us. My knuckles were white on the steering wheel, my teeth clenched. _Anyone who bothered to look could see us_.

“I have to go,” I blurted, suddenly terrified. I had barely survived the first time I’d driven Dave home. If he didn’t get out now, the second would surely kill me.

“Yeah, of course,” he said. His voice sounded strange but I was too panicked to really notice. He got out of the car. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Good night.”

I barely waited for the passenger door to close before I was peeling down his block, tires screeching their complaints. He stood there, startled, confused, watching. I knew I had hurt his feelings, but I could not escape fast enough.

And I thought to myself, _that takes care of that_.

*

I was mistaken.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: I've seen exactly what it is I never want to be, but I keep it deep inside myself. It's within me. Keep it deep within yourself and sink with me.


	11. Chapter 11

I was mistaken.

Dave showed up on my mom’s doorstep on the morning of Christmas Eve. He stood there in broad daylight for all the world to see, knocking steadily. What was more incriminating—the sight of him lingering on my front stoop, or the sight of him disappearing into my house? Why did I still care what anyone in this town thought of me?

I opened the door before I’d decided to. He stood there scowling in a Misfits hoodie, his long bangs in his eyes. Sometime in the last four days he’d dyed his hair screaming flame red. He looked small and dangerous, all skinny arms and wide hips and glare.

“Festive,” I said after too long a beat, meaning his hair. My brain and tongue felt sluggish, ill-suited to this task. I wished in a distracted way that I was wearing cooler pajamas: I doubted my A-Team t-shirt and centuries-old plaid pants were impressing anyone.

Davey stabbed me in the chest with his finger. “Are you mad at me?” he demanded, each word a sharply honed accusation.

It seemed like a trap. Set by the universe. At best, it was a practical joke. There were only bad answers. I wasn’t even sure what the truth was.

“No,” I said at last, awkwardly. I didn’t know him well enough to be mad at him. One kiss, one show, one band practice. Two rides home with miserable endings. I didn’t know him at all.

I refocused my gaze on the person before me. It wasn’t the same Davey I remembered from high school. This one was flintier, sharper-edged, angrier. “Good,” he said, sounding unhappy. “Then invite me inside.”

That one, I knew the answer to. _No, succubus, you may not come in. No, sin and temptation, hellfire and brimstone, I am not interested. It is Christmas. Go home._ I was aware that I was poised on the threshold of my last chance to drive him away, with torches and pitchforks, before my life went down like a line of dominoes, mistake after mistake after mistake. Maybe I was mad at him. Mad that, all those years ago, he had told. Mad that he had let me blame myself, cast myself as a villain and a monster, as despoiler and defiler.  
Mad that he was able to act like nothing had happened between us. Mad that maybe, for him, nothing had.

I looked at his face and I saw two versions: the real, current Dave, standing there with red hair and a pissed-off look on his face, and a younger, tearful one, whispering, _I’m going to go to hell_.

All Davey ever did was make me mad at myself.

“Yeah, all right,” I said tiredly. I stepped aside so he could enter.

Dave and I sat at my dining room table. His scowl wore off and his eyes started to glimmer as he spoke, outlining his grand plan: he’d heard my band. We were good. We were ready to record something. We were ready to record a split 7” with his band. At some point, my mom came downstairs in her robe and slippers. She made breakfast as if she had always had three sons and the presence of a red-haired stranger in her dining room was a matter of course. Smith followed the smell of her cooking downstairs and supplied Davey’s scheme with the enthusiasm I had failed to muster. By the time we were shoveling waffles into our mouths, the idea had taken hold of me too. It felt solid, real, possible. I insisted to myself that it was not just an excuse to link myself to Davey, to guarantee I’d see him once the new semester started up. Why would I care if I saw him or not? I asked myself, as if it were all very casual. He was pushy and bossy and confusing. He was taking advantage of me because I was better than his guitarist, because he needed a somewhat legitimate band to help foot the bill and sell his EP.

He was Davey. I didn’t care. I wanted to.

*

We did.  



	12. Chapter 12

We did.

The more time I spent with him, the more accustomed I grew to the constant barrage on my senses. Davey was sensory overload incarnate. Everything about him captivated and distracted me, my eyes constantly being torn to follow his every darting movement, to trace the lines of his smile, my head being pulled around whatever room he occupied. Even when he was out of sight his smell would linger; I could barely fumble through the chords of songs I’d written myself if I could hear his voice, faintly, in another room, rubbing against my skin. Tugging at something there. The most distracting thing of all was his laugh. I developed a sixth sense for Davey’s laugh. He so much as giggled anywhere in the tristate area, my skin erupted into goosebumps, my heart electrified, my breath hitched in my chest, my mind went utterly blank.

We recorded our EP in two afternoons. This was already more studio time than we could afford, more than our short, embryonic songs needed or deserved. It had taken less than a month of planning and practicing, less than a month for his idea to be fully realized and stamped onto pink vinyl. It wasn’t nearly long enough.

Being around him was stimulating to the point of numbness. It was like being drugged, like living in that twilight state they send you home from the dentist in. Nerve endings simultaneously rubbed raw and medicated by the look-feel-sound of him. Before long, I was able to sit in a room with Dave without pacing, without shutting down and blurting out something rude and awkward, without obsessively dwelling on what had happened back in high school. Without my thoughts returning to the muggy haze of what had happened at Magnus’s that night. If he noticed that I lurched around him like a drunk, that I was love-and-hatesick to the point of blindness, deafness, and dumbness, he didn’t let on. I concealed it from myself as well, in fits and starts. In alternating bursts of lust and denial.

He was eighteen years old. That fact alone I was obliged to wear like a hairshirt, a constant, chafing awareness. I do not exaggerate when I say that I don’t know how I survived it, those first few months of phone calls and occasional weekend visits. If I had to do it again, now, it would destroy me.

Somehow, impossibly, we became friends. The wolf and the lamb. Or, more accurately, the wolf and the huntsman. The worst thing about Dave was that, to me, he was already poison. The sweet kind—the kind you go crazy for—the kind that makes you frantic for your own death. Ant-trap poison. Just the look and sound and smell of him, that was love, or madness, at first sight. But the more I got to know him, the worse it got. The more we talked, the more I fell in love with the _person_ he was, with the ideas he had and the things he did and the words he used to describe them to me. I had already been barely able to resist him. The closer our friendship grew, the more lost I became. He was a labyrinth, and I was long out of string.

I gave myself up to him without question. I didn’t even notice as I gave him everything.

When his band broke up after high school graduation, I drove to Ukiah to comfort him. When they got back together again half a year later, he called me, ecstatic and shouting, from a pay phone outside the Phoenix Theater. When he dropped out of college to pursue his music, he called me to laugh wickedly, saying, _I’m just following your example_.

I finished my sociology degree, joined Redemption 87, played shows and wrote songs. I packed away my textbooks and played at being a rock star, giving guitar lessons and peddling axes I could never afford myself during the daylight hours, pale and drained as any vampire from whatever gig I’d played or danced at the night before. What I was only playing at, Dave was living. The years most of us spent learning how to shop for groceries and pay electric bills, he spent touring. Spent screaming on a stage and being adored. His band was _working_. In a non-stop barrage of punk chords and Davey’s screaming, they had released six EPs and two albums. They traveled around the West playing real tours, not just opening for bands whose records we’d grown up listening to but being opened _for_ by bands like the ones I currently played in. When he called me, from wherever in the country he was, he always sounded faraway and happy, his voice more like a glow than a sound. Instead of adulthood, he was learning the ropes of godhood. “We’ve got to keep burning, no matter how bright,” he would tell me, sounding dreamy and half-asleep, like a thing encased in amber. “I’m going to play music for the rest of my life. No matter what it costs.”

I never doubted it.

*

One drawback to being a rising star in the punk scene at the age of 22 is that it tends to leave you homeless. Dave swept into my physical life on the tail end of a tour and collapsed on my living room couch. He said, “Just for a night or two,” meaning “for the summer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The thing Davey says at the end about burning is actually from a 2006 interview in Revolver, titled "Davey Havok Has Agreed to Receive the Drag Queen". I will fight anyone who says that it is not necessary to have a reference list for fanfiction. THIS IS THE APPROPRIATE USE TO PUT MY GRAD STUDENT SKILLS TO.  
> **  
> Next: tonight, in the whispers, where we won't be found.
> 
> And: No one could touch us then. No one could change us then. No one could hurt us then. No one could see us then.
> 
> And: I can feel you dreaming of me. Beneath a dream, lost in a dream.


	13. Chapter 13

One drawback to being a rising star in the punk scene at the age of 22 is that it tends to leave you homeless. Dave swept into my physical life on the tail end of a tour and collapsed on my living room couch. He said, “Just for a night or two,” meaning “for the summer.”

He showed up with a suitcase and a bashful grin, looking up at me through his bangs in a manner he evidently found charming. He was run down from touring, hoarse-voiced and dark-eyed, behind on sleep and crackling with residual charisma from the deification of the stage. I was not immune. At that point in his life, Davey didn’t have any clean laundry, didn’t own a single pair of socks, hadn’t eaten a home-cooked meal in over two months. He grinned like an imp, like a punk Peter Pan with fairy dust mixed into his eyeliner, and needed me.

Of course I wasn’t immune.

At first, we were careful. We held a perfect distance from one another, orbiting always at least one yard apart, as if venturing any nearer would throw us into inescapable, fatal velocity, draw us to collide. He was a black hole and I was circling him; deceptively, it looked as if I drew no nearer, but he was eating me up.

One sweaty night I laid awake in my bed, rigid and tense, aching with awareness of his body one room over, sprawled across my couch. I was afraid to sleep, to relax my control even for a moment. I had demonstrated over and over again that I was not to be trusted. I was a cord stretched taut, trembling with the effort, knowing it was only a matter of time til I snapped. Til I threw myself at him, taking and mauling, helplessly devouring. I was a wild beast. I had proven it.

I was terrified. Of him, of myself. But I could not turn him away. Because every aching cell of me bled and burned and cried out with the desire for him to stay.

Molecule by molecule, atom by atom, I was being pulled to him. I had no choice at all: only to go to him willingly, or else be torn apart.

I laid awake that night, restless, stomach sour and cramped, heart pounding though I was still. Cool and lithe as a shadow, he crept into my room and slipped into the bed beside me. He sat on the edge of my bed and stared down at me, a dark, unrealized outline. “I can’t sleep,” he whispered, his tone shaped into the asking of a question, the seeking of permission.

I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move. “Me neither,” I croaked. Although I did not, could not, trust myself, honesty seemed safest.

Dave hesitated, shifting closer. One hand traced folds in my bedsheet, traveling inland, violating our unspoken three-foot neutrality zone. Had he ever observed it? Or had it always been me, again and again, who pulled away? Why else would he feel the need to ask permission, when it seemed so obvious that he owned me?

It would be years, still, before I ever considered what _I_ was doing to _him_.

“Can I... could I stay here?” he asked at last, sotto voce. I could taste my own heart on my tongue. “I’ve gotten so used to the sound of people breathing, to Adam’s snoring. It’s hard to sleep alone, in the quiet.” He paused, and in the stinging silence of my reply hurried on, “I know it’s stupid. But maybe just for tonight?”

His hand bumped up against mine where it lay clenched atop the sheet. I wanted to recoil, to pull back from this touch, but I was still frozen. He didn’t pull back either. Instead he let it rest there, fingertips brushing the back of my hand, growing bolder until suddenly he threaded his fingers through mine and squeezed, crushing the air between us. His wrist pressed into my palm, and I imagined I could feel his thundering pulse there.

“Just for tonight,” I managed to answer. Maybe I could survive one night. Maybe I could control myself for just a little longer.

Then Dave swung his legs onto the bed and shimmied close, fitting together the edges of our bodies. We stared at the ceiling in silence, my skin searing wherever it touched him. He did not let go of my hand. I didn’t think this was our agreement, didn’t think this was how they slept on tour, but when all of me ached with white-hot wanting, how could I say so?

He tipped his head to the side, nestling it into the space between my neck and shoulder. I could feel his breath on my collarbone, his hair brushing the sensitive skin where my throat and jaw met. “Things are changing,” he hummed, lips close enough to disturb the layer of air over my skin, close enough for me to feel the vibrations of each word. Blood rushed away from my head fast enough that I felt faint. If he noticed my suddenly impossible erection, I would die. _Things are changing_. Understatement of the fucking year.

“Sing for me,” he said, and the words had the effect of an incantation, like a spell I could not resist. “On our next album.”

The mood was all wrong, but I tried to joke. My heart beat like it was trying to batter itself senseless against my ribs. “I don’t know if odes to key lime pie can handle my operatic range.”

Davey snorted, the rush of air down my bare chest leaving goosebumps in its wake despite the night’s humidity and oppressive heat. “You could not do key lime pie justice,” he said. “I’ll have to write something different for you.” He squeezed my hand, his voice dropping. I didn’t think he was talking about his album anymore. “It’ll be different.”

“I don’t know what you want me to be, to you.” The sound of my lips brushing against one another, the sound of my breath, the sound of my rushing blood in my veins, could drown out my words. They were quieter than whispers and even that was louder than I dared. Dave went still, listening. I was dizzy with need for him. “I don’t know if I can be it.”

“I’ll wait,” he said, as if it were that simple. As if that were an answer. I felt his cheeks crease and round as his lips curled into a smile, a smile he pressed against my neck. “Til the seasons change,” he whisper-sang into my skin, the first I would ever hear of the song he’d write for me to sing with him. As would happen so often in the future, I had no way of knowing if it was a message, or only lyrics. “I’ll wait… til the fall comes.”

“What about going to hell?” I whispered in agony, not meaning to say it, not meaning to even think it. The words came out brokenly.

His smile froze on my skin. “You remember,” he said after a long moment. “I said that to you, the night we…” He shifted at my side, trying to find words that fit the long blank space between us. When he spoke his voice was hollow, contradicting his stuck-on smile. “After my dad died, I used to imagine him up in heaven, all golden and peaceful, waiting for me. And on the other side, fire and brimstone, horror and ash, eons of exquisite suffering, etcetera. I grew up… terrified of the things I was feeling. I remember being afraid to sleep, after the nuns told us God could see our dreams. I didn’t want to be punished for anything _unnatural_ , so I just decided I’d stay awake for the rest of my life. I was eleven, maybe.” He exhaled suddenly, as if frustrated by how the words were coming out, by how inadequate they were to reach back through time.

“I wanted to apologize, afterwards,” he said, changing tack. “For the way I acted. For letting my stepdad find out. It was a kind of self-flagellation, maybe; the epitemia the priest gave me didn’t seem like enough. I knew he’d try to hit it out of me and I wanted to hurt, wanted bruises on the surface to match the state of my thrashed heart.” He paused, stilled the uneasy motions flickering through his limbs. “I didn’t think he’d tell everyone he knew. After what happened… I was afraid. I guess I wasn’t thinking at all. There was this voice in my head going, _you’ll never see your dad again if you go to hell_. Stupid of me.” He took a breath, slow and shuddery. “And by the time the dust settled and I knew what I’d done, the damage I’d caused—you were gone. Everyone had a mouth full of poison, like your name was a stain.” His laugh was brittle. “People weren’t exactly lining up to be my prom date after that. I remember this one time, in the parking lot after school—if your brother and Adam hadn’t pulled those guys off me, I think they would’ve killed me. I’m sure it was worse for you. I heard the things they said. But I had three years left. I couldn’t run away. I had to own it. It had to become part of the legend, part of the show. I grew a second skin of barbs and flame. …I lived with my mistake every day.”

Another long breath and he carried on in a whisper, as if such fragile words would break if said too loudly. “What I’m trying to say is that kissing you, that night, stars pressed between our lips and the whole city laid out before us—that wasn’t the mistake. The mistake was staying away after.” His hand contracted around mine. It had been a long time since I’d spoken, since I’d breathed. His whisper was achingly, unmistakably fond. “I don’t want to stay away anymore. I can’t. So as for hell… I think this could be worth it.”

He said it decisively, as if he had given it much thought, considered carefully and weighed every alternative. An eternity of torture and suffering in exchange for what? A night of listening to my breathing? Or a mortal lifetime of he and I, our whole futures spreading out from our feet like cracks in ice? _Just for tonight_ , I’d said. It wasn’t fair, not to tell me the terms. I had no idea what I was agreeing to. And yet, even scared and confused and reeling from the unintentional cruelty of his words, I was unable to resist. Unable to tell if I even wanted to.

With his body pressed against the line of mine, our fingers tangled together, my limbs felt heavy and waterlogged and sticky with sweat, except for those few electric inches where we touched. I never managed to answer. Instead I fell asleep that way, aching and paralyzed by the closeness of him, by the smell of his hair and the feel of his lips on my skin. I spent my last waking thought wondering what he’d do when the seasons changed, if this was him _waiting_.

*

After that night, Dave never went back to the couch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: As I go under, please tuck me in.


	14. Chapter 14

After that night, Dave never went back to the couch. Oh, he’d start there. But sometime in the night he’d always creep into my bed again. Sometimes I would be awake for it. Other times I’d wake in the middle of the night and he’d be there, pressed against me, sighing in his sleep. Once, mistaking his deep contented breathing for the steady respiration of a sleeper, I brushed his hair off his forehead and murmured, “What do I have to do to get you to stay in your own bed?” His mouth bowed into a sleepy smile, his eyelids flickering. “Tuck me in,” he suggested dreamily. “Kiss my eyes and lay me to sleep.” He leaned into my fingertips, burying himself deeper against my side. “Aren’t I in my own bed already?” he mumbled. He fell asleep smiling into my chest.

During the daylight hours, we maintained a safe distance. I’m making it sound like it was difficult, being around him—and it was. But it was easy, too. Being with Davey came naturally to me. I had a special talent for making him laugh. He’d watch me out of the corner of his eye, dark brows knitted together in a careful frown, and some small comment or wry observation would split his concentrated solemnity into a grin that lit up his whole face. We went to record stores and shows together, walked around Oakland, got coffee and sandwiches. We’d write for hours in my apartment, me playing a keyboard or guitar, him shaping his voice to match my fingers as if by instinct. He gave me feedback on songs I was writing and I sang backing vocals for him, both of us standing clothed and chest-to-chest in my shower stall where the acoustics were best and imagining how we might sound in a recording booth. I cooked for him and he made a nuisance of himself, managing to burn his fingers and simultaneously cover himself and everything else in flour every time he set foot in the kitchen. He broke dishes when I put him in charge of drying, left food caked on them if I asked him to wash. I had never met someone so bad at laundry.

We’d stay up for hours, just talking, his easy smile and ready laugh. We’d sprawl on the couch and watch late night TV and say nothing at all. I’d never met anyone like him. I’d never had a summer like that before—never enjoyed that kind of easy, domestic bond with anyone. It seemed only right that he was a constant fixture in my life, that I would leave him behind in bedsheets in the morning and find him breaking things and cursing in my kitchen when I got home from work. By August, we no longer kept any façade of him sleeping on the couch. The pillows and sheets disappeared from the living room. I led him by the hand to my bed each night and we slept curled together like commas, my arm across his chest, my hand cupped around his heartbeat.

It was the happiest I’d ever been, even if I couldn’t tell anyone about it. Who knows how long we could have gone on that way, in that cozy space between men who shared an apartment and men who shared a bed.

But eventually, like everything else, the summer ended.

*

  
As part of his training in being a real boy, Dave accompanied me to the grocery store. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: pure sweetness.


	15. Chapter 15

As part of his training in being a real boy, Dave accompanied me to the grocery store. I’m sure he had friends in the area—people who wanted to see him, exciting invitations. Interesting things he could do. I know he did; I met these people, whenever we went to parties or shows. But that summer, the only thing Davey seemed to want to do was follow me around. Insinuate himself inextricably into my daily life. Start arguments in the cereal aisle.

“I am not eating granola for another goddamn minute,” Davey announced grandly, arms crossed against his chest over a box of Cookie Crisp. “I just don’t have that much time in the morning to devote to chewing.”

“Cookie Crisp is not the answer,” I said, frowning at yet another bag of vanilla coconut candy that had mysteriously found its way into the cart. “Too much crispiness.” Leaving Dave unsupervised in a grocery store invariably led to spending your entire paycheck on a smorgasbord of vegan snacks. “I bet I could find something you don’t have to chew at all. Like a squeezable tube of whey protein or some kind of breakfast gel. Nutrition Toothpaste, we can call it. Hey! How about a carton of egg substitute? You can drink that with a _straw_ , baby.”

Davey glared at me as I returned three boxes of Ninja Turtle fruit snacks to the shelf. He hugged his cereal more tightly to his chest.

“Next you’re going to say I can’t get the popsicles,” he accused.

“Next I’m going to get you tested for diabetes. Are you a hummingbird? Because if not, it probably isn’t necessary to eat your entire body weight in sugar on a daily basis.”

The good-natured squabble carried us through the aisles. He was much more pliable in the produce section with no brightly-colored packages to distract him, but his grip on the cereal box did not loosen. I didn’t mind. I’d have bought him the whole store, if he’d asked me to.

“We need to have a serious conversation,” Dave said, hijacking the cart and steering resolutely in the direction of the pharmacy, “about your lifestyle.” He marched us to a glittering aisle of mysterious tubes and sinister devices, nudging me with the cart when I veered off course or showed signs of faltering. “It’s not very rock and roll.”

He had halted the forced march in front of an eyeliner display. The look on his face was very serious. I glanced around nervously but espied no escape.

“You’re joking,” I said.

“I’m not.”

I tried to back up but the cart was behind me. There was nowhere to run. Dave fixed me with a menacing look. “Guyliner is a time-honored punk tradition.”

“No,” I said flatly.

“No self-respecting punk guitarist leaves home without it,” he bullied.

“Good thing I’m none of those things, then.”

“Dress for the job you want, Puget! Are you gonna sell midlife crisis Stratocasters and teach surly teens how to read tabs forever?”

“I also,” I pointed out, “have a sociology degree.”

Davey bore down upon me in all his dark fury. “You wore eyeliner in high school.” He pressed a dark liquid wand into my hand.

“That’s kind of my point!” I gave it back.

“Freddie Mercury. Robert Smith. David Bowie. Morrisey,” he chanted like a fell incantation.

“All singers. I’m not a singer.” Other shoppers were beginning to stare.

“Tell that to the guy who requires an hour of yodeling and all the hot water every morning in the shower!”

“Says the homeless wandering minstrel. You’re lucky I let you use the _cold_ water, freeloader!”

For a moment, I had the upper hand. Escape from this metallic pink humiliation was imminent. But he had been saving his trump card til my defenses were worn down. Davey poked me in the chest with the thick black tube to underscore his killing blow. “Eyeliner. Is. Sexy.”

What was he but living proof? I capitulated with a sigh, as he’d known I would all along. I grabbed the liner from his hand, scowling. “I’m only buying this to shut you up,” I grumbled. “I’m not going to wear it.”

“It’s waterproof,” he told me serenely. “So feel free to cry when you realize you’re wrong.”

*

It was the quiet, domestic things I loved best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: In the Hughes film I had scored, produced and starred in, in my mind.


	16. Chapter 16

It was the quiet, domestic things I loved best. One sweltering afternoon in July, I was whiling away the hours of my shift at the guitar shop. I was on the sales floor between lessons when Dave walked in the door. He paused on the threshold for dramatic effect, rays of California sunshine framing him like St. Elmo’s fire. He was dressed in indecently tight black jeans and a Bowie t-shirt that had belonged to me up until the moment he laid eyes on it. His hair was growing out from its most recent dye job, curling at the tops of his ears, blue at the ends and natural raven at the roots. He raked it back out of his eyes with black-painted nails, casting his gaze about the store. And those eyes: bottomless brown, bright with reflected light like thick dark honey, smudged with last night’s eyeliner. They fell upon me and his whole face blazed to accommodate the glow of his easy grin.

“So this is where the magic happens,” he said, gesturing to a wall of amps and a hanging Fender display on his way to me. With each step he took the giddy knot in my stomach tightened.

I grinned stupidly back at him. “Welcome to the Jade Puget School of Musical Excellence.”

“Do you get a lunch break? I wanted Thai.”

“And you forgot the way to the Thai place? You were worried you couldn’t open the take-out container without my help?”

Dave scowled and swatted my arm. I’d taken oven primary responsibility for his nutrition since he’d demonstrated his willingness to subsist entirely on guacamole and Oreos.

“I wanted to take you to lunch, asshole,” he grumbled, feigning sullen offense. “Although I’m no longer sure why.”

It was what I’d wanted him to say. The tightness in my stomach did an exhilarating flip when he said aloud that he wanted to have lunch with me.

When I got back from that lunch, I was functionally floating several inches off the ground. I couldn’t stop smiling. “Nice date, Puget?” one of my coworkers asked me.

My grin froze on my face, suddenly brittle. “Dave’s just a friend,” I said cautiously, lying.

“Well, he seems to make you very happy.”

After that Dave started showing up for my lunch breaks regularly. I remember the first time someone recognized him, the first time a fan approached him. He absolutely _shone_ that day, daylight breaking over his face, pleasure and kindness and pride reshaping the entire architecture of the man. If I hadn’t already, I fell in love with him then, with the shape of his jaw and the tactile excitement on his face and the impassioned gesturing of his dark-nailed hands. With the enthusiasm and respect with which he greeted that fan, with the tender glow that so visibly filled him. With the way he wore it—openly, guilelessly. I could see the world touching him then, see its effect on him, see the impression of warmth it left upon it. Can you picture the beauty in that? In broadcasting the plain and total truth of who he was and what he felt? I had never seen anything like it. In that moment, I was lost.

*

“Come with me,” he said.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: Under the summer rain, you turned away.


	17. Chapter 17

“Come with me,” he said.

His imploring eyes were inscrutable. I couldn’t read on his face what his intentions were, what exactly he was asking. Whatever it was, he appeared to have made his peace with it and all its implications.

“And go where?” I asked carefully. I didn’t want to be angry that he was leaving. In my haste to disguise it, I stumbled onto other things I was angry about instead. I asked the wrong questions.

Dave’s brow creased ever-so-slightly. I took for granted that I was dazzled and swept along by him. I did not consider if I had any similar effect on him. I could only wonder what he wanted, guess at why he thought I had value. I assumed that, since I was powerless, he must be in control.

“Wherever I go,” he said, sounding vaguely affronted. “Back to the Bay. Then to L.A. to record. On tour.” He was trying to say _I want you to come with me_. I didn’t hear him. I was so busy being insulted I didn’t notice I was insulting him. Or maybe I just didn’t care.

“And do what?” I asked less carefully.

Dave frowned openly. I could read his face now—a high dark thundercloud, crackling with lightning. Hurt and anger coursing at high speeds and whipping up a deadly storm. I should have asked _what would it mean if I went with you? What would it mean if I stayed? What has all this meant already?_. But I wasn’t ready for the answer.

Instead I said, “I can’t just follow you around like a groupie. My life is here—my job, my band, my friends. You want me to—what? Leave everything behind so you don’t have to sleep alone?”

“I want you to come with me,” he said again. He was the one speaking carefully now.

“What for?” I demanded bluntly. A curtain of anger and hurt rolled across Dave’s dear face, obscuring it, rendering his curving mouth and laughing eyes all in edges and corners and shadow. It sharpened away all traces of softness.

“To be with me!” he cried hotly. “Isn’t that enough? I thought you’d _want_ to!” But he wasn’t really asking anymore. An hour later, his things were packed and he was gone.

*

It was six weeks before we spoke again.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: When you blink, you find the misery weighs down your eyes. So take my side and sleep with me.


	18. Chapter 18

It was six weeks before we spoke again.

I came home in a black mood from a grueling shift at work stacked back-to-back with a band practice that had devolved into squabbling, yet again, about the liner notes for our upcoming album. Of all stupid things. My apartment, which had seemed just the right size last May, now seemed cavernous and cold. Even my mattress was a vast unmapped expanse these days, much too big for one.

A red light blinked on my answering machine. A half-formed hope it would be a message from Dave bubbled up in me only to be shot down by a voice I recognized but couldn’t immediately place.

“Hey Jade, this is Adam Carson. We’re booking studio time for early October and I wanted to get an idea of what dates would work for you. Give me a call. Thanks.”

I listened to the message at least five times before I believed I had not hallucinated it. _Sing for me_ , Dave had said, as August bore down upon us. The memory felt like a dream. I must have agreed.

I dialed the number Adam had left with sweating hands. I felt in my gut that Dave would be the one to answer. He had to be. Why else would I be trembling just from thinking of him? Why else would I feel him there?

The phone rang and I couldn’t bear it. Once, twice, a third time. My stomach clenched like a fist while it rang hollowly through to voicemail. Dave’s pre-recorded voice informed me that I’d reached the physical residence of at least 50% of AFI and invited me to express myself after the beep provided I had no particular expectations about what would follow.

My gut had betrayed me. I faltered, feeling stupid. Not calling for a month and a half had made Dave’s esteem for me pretty clear, hadn’t it? With the way we’d left things—the way I’d behaved. With Adam being the one to call me now. Panicked, I wondered why Adam had called at all. I’d assumed Davey wanted to see me again, to make up. But maybe he only wanted to twist the knife.

Thoughts and blood racing, I said stupidly, “Uh, hi. Jade Puget here.” I was certain I had never sounded so phenomenally dorky in my life. “I’m returning Adam’s call… in which he asked me to… call. Uh, so, I’ll be in Oakland in October. For some of October. At other points in October I’ll be touring. But we have a show in L.A. on the, uh, on the 11th, I think? You guys are recording at Nitro, right? Huntington Beach?”

I ran out of babble and just sat on the line, breathing. Finally I said, “So. If that works, I can do it. Otherwise maybe I could drive down there or. Uh. What did you need me for, exactly?”

The line clicked and I thought the machine had cut me off before I could hemorrhage any more awkwardness. But then Davey’s laugh filled my ear, hot and close. “That was the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. His voice uncurled lazy and golden, a dear sound I’d half-forgotten in the long silence. “That was the answering machine equivalent of a bird caught in an oil spill. I feel like I should send rescue workers to clean that voicemail off your feathers.”

I found myself grinning. Just the sound of his voice over the phone broke down all my uncertainty and constraint. “It’s good to hear your asshole voice,” I told him honestly. “I missed—this.” At the last moment I balked at saying _you_.

“Me too,” he said. A pause, staggering by what it did and did not contain. The most incredible thing about human language is the way it allows you to say exactly what you mean and obscure it at the same time. “So are you coming? Will you sing for me?”

The practicalities of places and dates and whether my schedule could accommodate his every whim dropped away. They didn’t matter. If Davey had said they were recording on the moon, I’d have started construction on a rocket. “Of course,” I told him, excitement fizzing under my skin. “Just say when.”

“Now,” he said, voice brimming with warmth and relief and urgency. “Always. God, every second.”

****

*

Huntington Beach in September tasted of autumn and smoke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: will you pause to break my heart? / I never, never wanted this; always wanted to believe.


	19. Chapter 19

Huntington Beach in September tasted of autumn and smoke. It was 1997 and California was burning. The fires were inland, far from the coast, but the air was thick and crackling with the far-off flames. My lungs burned from breathing it.

I expected a reunion. I expected the same terrifying heat and closeness that threatened to consume. I expected that things would somehow have stayed the same.

They hadn’t.

Was it the ash in the wind or did his look burn me?

I arrived at the address he’d given me at dusk. It was the last weekend in September. I was missing work, missing band practice, had not even told anyone I’d be gone. I hadn’t known how to explain why I had to go. The truth—singing backing vocals—twisted in the wind, insubstantial. The reason I went was not the reason I went.

Dave was living in a split-level ranch with blue Dutch shutters looking ill at ease over brown stucco. The lawn was a choked orange-green, the squat front porch labored and sagging. A porch swing shrieked quietly to itself as it was stirred by the breeze.

The front door was half-open, as if the all-American family that had painted those hopeful shutters had left in a hurry. I felt like a ragged survivor in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I let myself in.

My tongue felt too thick for me to call out. I followed the sound of voices through a dark wood-paneled den, shag carpeting stacked with haphazard towers of boxes.

In the dining room stood a shirtless blond, his back to me. His head was bent over his bass, his fingers pulling out a rippling grumble of notes. Dave clapped his hands and laughed delightedly from across the room. Instead of a dining table, Adam’s cannibalized hunk of a drum kit crouched on the linoleum.

Mark noticed me first, clenching my jaw in the doorway as I watched Davey watch the half-naked stranger. I’d known their old bassist had quit during their last tour. That he’d been replaced by a peroxide blond who did not own any shirts was news to me.

“Puget,” Mark said unenthusiastically, never having forgiven me for Davey’s endless comparisons between our guitar techniques. All eyes were on me then. Even the blond spun around to see me, grinning in an affable way I found intensely dislikable.

“Spooky entrance, dude,” said the blond. “Are you part of a post-knocking society?”

My cheeks flamed. Dave’s eyes had gravitated back to the blond already. I felt that I had a perfect understanding of the situation. I should not have accepted Davey’s offer to crash at the house. He hadn’t meant it the way I’d taken it. I should not have driven eight hours south.

“The front door was open,” I muttered in the direction of my feet. I did not look up until I felt the light touch of Dave’s hand on my arm.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said quietly, apologetically.  
“Happy to help out.” My voice out too big, too cheerful, too loud. Too false. Dave’s hand broke from the spot above my elbow he had touched. He did not meet my eyes.

*

Not surprisingly, I did not take to Hunter right away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't own the boys and this never happened. I am thinking very much about the fire/water dichotomy Davey was written over the years, and the way that the metaphor has changed and grown as he has. He always wanted to remake the world in fire; fire was life, water was sleep and sleep was death, the worst and coldest thing was going under. These days he writes about how he is made of ice and how that has enabled him to survive, hollow and cold; he writes about how he doesn't recognize himself or the people around him (before you're through, you'll be someone who looks a lot like you); he writes about how he has slipped underwater; he writes about how Jade has slept, has preserved himself that way; in your slumber, you saved everything--but me. May you feel this, as you sleep.
> 
> Next: Am I your anything?


	20. Chapter 20

Not surprisingly, I did not take to Hunter right away. He was irreverent and weird and disconcertingly deadpan in his humor. He was interesting and unapologetically cool and obnoxiously handsome. I hated him immediately, even after he put a shirt on. His uninflected sarcasm enabled me to cast him as an asshole—a villain even, especially while Davey’s eyes were on him. And Davey’s eyes were often on him.

I felt dull and useless without a guitar in my hands. I’d never thought much about my singing voice one way or the other. I could hit the notes, but my throat wasn’t where music lived for me. From the moment I walked in I wondered why I was there: Hunter blazed in the light of Davey’s eyes. He didn’t need me.

He’d made me think he needed me.

There was a strained moment in the kitchen, after Hunter left and Mark went to his room. Adam was puttering around with his kit in the other room, preparing it for the trip to the studio. When I could not bear the silence any longer I said, “He seems… fun.”

Davey was folding a coffee filter smaller and smaller, frowning intensely at it. He buzzed with an energy that told me I would not be allowed to retreat to the couch to lick my wounds in solitude just yet. I would need to parade them a bit longer.

We had not yet discussed where I’d be sleeping.

“We just met him!” The words burst out of Davey with a desperate air. “I mean, he’s not even officially a member of the band.”

I had no idea what I’d driven six hours for, if we were just going to talk about the membership status of various individuals involved with his band. I felt the special kind of misery that I’d come to associate with Davey, over time.

“I’m happy for you,” I lied mechanically. Neither of us could seem to take our eyes off the progressively disappearing coffee filter. If he kept at it for long enough, he’d fold it out of existence.

For the band,” Davey corrected. I wasn’t sure how to tell him that trying to make me feel better only hurt me worse.  
“Well, I’m pretty tired from the drive,” I said awkwardly. Davey stirred from his folding trance and cast his eyes up at me through his shaggy chin-length bangs.

“Of course,” he said with undue remorse, latching onto to something concrete he could apologize for. “I didn’t think. Let’s get you settled so you can get some sleep.”

I followed him back into the den, where a broken-backed couch, marooned in a sea of unpacked boxes, beckoned its fantastically overstuffed cushions. I really was tired. The excitement of seeing Davey, the half-manic drive, the plummet to reality when I saw Dave’s hand on Hunter’s arm, their heads angled together, Davey’s grinning mouth so close to his ear… I was exhausted.

I flopped face-first onto the couch, forgetting to hedge politely. Davey hesitated at the edge of the room. “My room’s through here,” he said, gesturing jerkily.

“Thanks. I’ll let you know if I develop any toiletry or linen needs.” It wasn’t til his face fell, softness vanishing as he dropped his tentative smile, that I retroactively heard the invitation his words had held.

My cheeks flamed. I was unable to decide which of us I was angry at. Davey’s face was hard and closed, his arms crossed. He wore his hurt like it was rage—he always did, even then. It made him dangerous in a fight but hard to reach in quiet moments. Impossible to make reparations to. There was never hope of armistice. I didn’t know why he’d want me taking up space in his bed, when he’d been looking at and laughing with and pawing at and fawning over Hunter for the last three hours.

I didn’t know what to say, now, to make things feel better for either of us.

So all I said was “good night.”

*

I woke to the low murmur of voices drifting in from the porch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: weightless, endless, faithless I'll adore you.


	21. Chapter 21

I woke to the low murmur of voices drifting in from the porch. Snuggling deeper into the couch, I listened without meaning to.

“...my first real California fire,” Davey was saying on the other side of the blinds. “I was terrified. I had never met with anything so big or senseless or powerful. Do you remember how it spread? Devastating and unstoppable, devouring everything it touched. And it was so _mindless_ —there was no malice. There was nothing you could plead with. It destroyed because… because it was hungry, because that’s what fire does, because that’s what it is to burn. It was awful—as in, full of awe. Awe-inspiring. I was terrified but I was enthralled by it too, wonderstruck by its brute power. I never forgot about it, the way I felt, frightened and reverent at once. …It burned for fifteen days.”

I knew what he was describing: the Wheeler fire of 1985. The firestorm had started in the Ojai Valley and spread ruthlessly, eating its way across the state, set upon the helpless populace by a mercurial wind. I’d heard him talk about it before, the same paralyzed marvel in his voice then as now. He had been preoccupied with remaking the world in fire ever since. It was a metaphoric experience he’d never recovered from.

“How did that one start?” I tensed beneath my blanket at the sound of Hunter’s voice. Of course. All the stories, all the pieces of himself Davey had shared, they weren’t mine to keep. They were Hunter’s now, too. Maybe instead.

Davey laughed in that soft amazed way of his. “You don’t remember? That’s the best part. Arson. There was a manhunt across five counties for the guy who started it. He started at least twelve more, like it was his mission to see California burn… He was killed,” Davey adds, sounding disappointed by mortality, “in a car crash.” His tone makes it obvious that fire, the real hero of this story, would never be so easily quelled.

“Can you imagine it? Starting that fire?” Something deeper than awe crept into his voice. Admiration. Even envy. “Unleashing that kind of raw devastation. Those first sparks spreading out from your feet, the cinders falling like snow, and the wild freedom of knowing you wouldn’t be able to stop it or control it or take it back. Knowing it could turn on your with just one ill wind, knowing it would consume you just as easily, as indifferently, as anything else. I get—god, look, I get goosebumps every time I think about it.”

“I feel very safe,” Hunter quipped lightly. The overwhelming inadequacy of his response served to magnify what Davey had said. I felt humbled by it, by him. Davey seemed so much most alive than everyone else.

“That’s what this feels like, though,” Dave said softly. My whole body strained to hear him. “I want it, but I know I can’t control it. If I give in to what I feel… if I throw myself like the sparks into the wind… everything could burn. The enormity of it… I’m terrified and I’m awed. What if I set the world on fire? What if it consumes me?”

Hunter sounded serious when he replied, a solemnity approaching veneration. His words froze the blood in my veins, the hot thick meat of my heart. His words drowned me.

“It’s an odd way,” he said, “to say ‘I love you’.”

And Davey, my Davey, said simply, “But I do.”

*

Since all was lost anyway, I threw caution to the wind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: tonight, in the whispers, where we won't be found; nothing can stop us now...


	22. Chapter 22

Since all was lost anyway, I threw caution to the wind. It wasn’t just _bodies_ , it wasn’t just _sex_ , it was love. It was the apocalypse. Davey loved Hunter and I had lost the only thing I had ever really wanted. I’ll wait, he’d said. Til the seasons change.

I sang numbly that day, the lashing anger of Davey’s lyrics barely licking the block of frigid ice within my chest. I was too afraid to want him, and so I had lost him. What Dave had said about the Wheeler fire—I knew how that felt. I had felt it. But instead of dropped a match I’d backed away.

It turned out there were worse things than being burned to ash. Worse things than being devoured, being in agony and ecstasy consumed.

I would have done anything to feel warmth again, even for a single second. That’s what I was thinking, to the extent that I could think at all, that night when I stood outside his bedroom door. I clutched the broken-open hole in my chest with one hand, reeling in the dark and silent. With my other hand I knocked.

Davey glowed like a phantom, shirtless and pale. His hair was a tangled halo around his head, his eyes sunk in sleep circles, leaving him haunted and wan. _Beautiful_ did not begin to cover it. The way he looked in the middle of the night fit brokenly into my memories. He looked as much different as he did the same. His bare skin was a foreign country to me now, not a worn familiar roadmap. If I hadn’t been so terribly cold I’d have wept at the dear, strange sight of him.

“Jade?” He invoked my name, sounding puzzled. His voice was galvanic, electrifying my skin.

“I know it’s stupid,” I said in a rush, echoing what he’d said to me, months ago when the earth had still circled the sun and the muscle in my chest had reliably beat. “But please. Just for tonight.”

His brown eyes fell on mine, full of concern and questions. It broke over me like the tide. I was swept to him.

Our bodies collided, my lips desperately seeking his, the kiss I’d spent years longing for tearing out of me. Where our skins touched, they sparked. My hands lit minute fires all over his body. I wanted to crawl into his chest, taste his heartbeat. I wanted to breathe him in.

We stumbled back from the doorway, a sharp breath breaking from Davey’s lips as he sunk down onto his bed, drawing me down after him.

“Is this okay?” I asked into his mouth. Davey caught my lip in his teeth, pulled my head down with a hand tangled in my hair, kissed me deeply and feverishly. “More,” he moaned hoarsely, tugging at the waist of my pajama pants, slipping them down over my hips. Surprisingly strong fingers dug into my hipbones. He writhed against me, matching my frenzy and fury with his own.

Fire was spreading, unfurling in my core, melting everything it touched. With the last rational scrap of will I possessed I broke my mouth away from his taut neck. His hand was wrapped around my cock, making the world burn into gold behind my eyes. “Do you—are you sure you want this,” I gasped. He had found a condom somewhere and was fumbling one-handed with its wrapper. He paused to stare fiercely, unflinchingly, into my eyes. His gaze was liquid amber, his cheeks flushed red, his skinny chest heaving and bright with impressions of my teeth.

“I have wanted this since before I knew what want was,” he said, enunciating clearly, making sure I heard.

He tore open its wrapper and put the condom in my hand. I looked down at him, wriggling out of his boxers, the long pale lines of him in the dim moonlight, the dark ink blooming at tender points of his anatomy. I thought about pressing into the tight heat of him while he moved and moaned around me. I thought about how quickly I would come, inside him. I thought about what had happened at Low Gap and what it had been like, believing I had taken something from him.

I wrapped my hand around the base of his dick, feeling like I might overflow just from the feel of his skin, and rolled the condom down over his erection. He tipped his head to the side, studying me with dark eyes. He seemed to reach a decision. He leaned up, stretching his neck to kiss me. Then he turned away, rummaging in his bedside table and coming back with lube. He watched me, eyes wide and intent, lips sowing the barest hint of a smirk, as he pressed a finger inside me.

The substance of time softened, moments turning molten and slick, melting together in a hot, hazy rush of sensation. I was ember and flame, ache and want. He began to move his finger, firm and insistent. The world contracted to a dizzying pinpoint, to his skin on mine, to his hands and mouth and motion. He pushed me down onto the sheets, staring down at me hungrily, his narrow chest heaving, his arm taught and trembling beside my head, his bangs dangling in my face. I turned my head, closed my teeth on his wrist. Time flickered past, not solidifying again until he pulled back the fingertips that had been just barely reaching something brilliant, aureate, huge. I moaned against his pulse in protest. He guided himself into me in answer. Cruelly, kindly, his hips began to move. Deliberate and deep. I could not bear it. My lips curled back, my teeth buried in his softest skin, pressure near to bursting.

I didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t an orgasm I could ride but one I could only collapse under, giving in. Thrusting, the thick head of his cock hit that sweet singing strand inside me, brushed up against a golden chord, and I was powerless. I felt sudden panic, instead of release; it wrapped around me and dragged me under, reminding me of undertow, of the time as a child I’d been pulled deeply under and nearly drowned. My lungs burned and I was bursting for air and I knew that if I screamed the water would fill my lungs and kill me. Struggling against something so much bigger than me was pointless, impossible. I came with drowning desperation, bucking against the treacherous tide, trying to hold on to any scrap or shred of myself that I recognized, but I was all panic and fear and a hot seam of gold, rolling liquid inside me, bashing against my nerve endings with sheer, consuming, terrifying bliss. I was subsumed by it. A sob ruptured my locked lips and I could breathe again, sweet cool air rushing into my lungs, and I knew I was not really underwater, pummeled on all sides by terror and ecstasy, was not really drowning. But the difference was academic, so abstract as to be meaningless. He pounded into me again and again with all the destructive force of an endless tide, and I tried not to weep, tears burning as the last of it shuddered through me. He let out a strangled cry as he came, hot and sudden inside me. Panting, the expansion and contraction of his ribs against me was half a comfort, half a cage. His lips burned against my ear. “Oh my god,” he moaned. And I was lost, dragged to the bottom of the sea and drowned utterly. I could not but come back here, but come back to this again and again, this moment of perfect wholeness and sublimation and completion. This golden terror and surging bliss. There was no me anymore, would never be a me again. I was his now. He pulled out of me with a gasp, but it was too late. We were fused. I was part of him. I _was_ him. There was no me.

*

Time passed in spurts after that. He was mine and not Hunter’s, he was Hunter’s and not mine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERE IT IS! This is definitely the one you've been waiting for, yes? To me it is evocative of A Deep Slow Panic and the way terror/consumption/eroticism are all tangled up together in Davey's writing.   
> **  
> Next: our dreams seemed not far away; I want to, I want to, I want to stay. I fell into fantasy.


	23. Chapter 23

Time passed in spurts after that. He was mine and not Hunter’s, he was Hunter’s and not mine. That night—the only night, for me, anymore—I had laid beside him, trying to match his breaths, as his dark room yielded to grey dawn around us. I withdrew my hands as the sun rose, knowing he was not mine to touch. I showered quietly, dressed quickly, and drove back to Oakland before he woke. It was not something we talked about. Like the kiss, like the nights he’d spent in my bed, it became another whispered moment, another fleet and fiery contact in the dead of night that burned away under morning’s light. Sometimes it seemed it had only been a dream.

I measured time in days between his phone calls, weeks between his visits, months between his shows that I could drive out to. My life contracted around him. He became the fixed point at my center. At the outer edges, time was hazy and aimless, loping disjointedly around the rim. The nearer to him I drew, the most frenetic and vibrant life became. I lived on the periphery in black and white. I alternated between listening to his records desperately, closing my eyes and trying to will him into the room beside me, and avoiding them entirely. Sometimes I used the soundboards at work to separate out just his vocal track and mine, to listen to our voices mingle in the void, to listen to our harmonies. Other times that broke my heart.

A girl named Paulie asked me out, rather transparently because she was interested in Davey. I didn’t mind; I was hung up on him too. It made her seem like an ideal match. We could pine brokenly over the same impossible fantasy. Our ears perked up in tandem at the mention of AFI. We both knew the songs by heart. We broke up after a few months, when it became apparent to her that I had no intention of bringing her to a show or introducing her to the band. Paulie was a sweet girl, sexy and energetic, the drummer in an all-woman punk band with an encyclopedic knowledge of 80s movies and impeccable movie taste. I was convinced Davey would like her, so I made it my life’s mission to keep them apart.

There was no point to it, really. He called me one day and told me, blithely, that Hunter had officially joined the band. Bitterly I asked him if Hunter had moved into the house.

“Well, we’ve mostly been living out of the tour bus,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you think I should ask him, when we get back?”

I could have wept. I was unable to keep the spite out of my voice when I answered. “Of course you should,” I spat. “You love him, don’t you? He’s not just the sound of someone else breathing, not just a place to sleep at night, not just an easy fuck. I hope you are very. Fucking. Happy together.”

And I hung up the phone.

*

With Davey, there are always consequences.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: It's in the blood; I met my love before I was born.


	24. Chapter 24

With Davey, there are always consequences.

He showed up at my front door thirteen hours later in the pouring rain, eyeliner streaking from the drops, looking mad as anything. He knocked with enough force to break down the door. I flung it open without looking to see who it was, believing it to be some kind of emergency.

Anyone else would have hit me. I had never seen a being of such perfectly contained, trembling rage. The surface tension of him, this column of anger, was incredible; another drop of righteousness and he would have split at the seams, shattering the container. When we had last, disastrously, spoken, he had been on the East Coast. I did not want to guess at what he had paid for a plane ticket, nor what dread combination of car, plane, bus, and train had brought him through the night to me.

He stood there, dour and shivering in the rain, hands in fists, and said through clenched teeth, “We need to establish some ground rules for phone etiquette.”

“What,” said I.

He scowled at my stunned expression and hyper-intelligent utterance, and pushed past me into my living room. He stood dripping on the rug and planted his hands on his hips. Not knowing what else to do, I shut the door behind him.

“That whole saying something dramatic and then hanging up thing,” he said, waving his hand in a way that indicated his regard for that kind of behavior. “We absolutely cannot function long-distance if you do shit like that.”

“Long-di—?”

“Oh, if you wanted to talk you should have stayed on the phone,” he interrupted, stabbing me in the chest with an accusing finger. Yet I observed a strange phenomenon behind his eyes. Beneath the rage and anger, there was a glimmer of—mirth. He was furious, he wanted to kill me, he was about to laugh.

“I almost called your _mother_ ,” he went on. The spark of humor in his brown eyes grew brighter and I knew I was not imagining it. My peril was no less real for it, though. He could still turn on me. His fury was sufficient to carry him across the country; I was right to be afraid. “That’s how mad I am at you right now. That’s how furious I was when you hung up. I thought to myself, _I should call Mrs. Puget and tell her what an ill-mannered dipshit she raised_. And then I thought, _No. I will go to California and I will tell him myself._ And here I am.”

“And here you are,” I agreed. Agreeing seemed the safest route. Supporting this assumption, he allowed me to finish my sentence.

“Well, I want you to know you’re an ill-mannered dipshit,” he said after a beat. That didn’t seem worth flying across the country for, though, so I waited for the rest of it.

I did not wait long. “So the next thing I want to say to you is, I will tear your fucking heart out if you think I’m in love with _Hunter_.”

The words burst out of me, perilous and unwise. “I saw you!” I cried. “I saw the way you were with him! And I—I heard you on the porch! You told him he was the Wheeler fire! You told him that you loved him!”

“You—you’re an idiot,” Dave spluttered. His cheeks were blazing red roses. “ _You’re_ the Wheeler fire,” he told me. “I was talking about _you_.”

“But I heard—”

“Did you hear the words ‘Hunter I love you’?” he challenged. “ _Did you?_ ”

“…No,” I was forced to admit. “Not those words exactly.”

Davey shook his head in exasperation. He began to pace, three steps away from me and three steps back. He did not seem to know what to do with his hands. He was shivering harder now. “I have loved you since I was fifteen years old and I split open my knee and you ran to me with pain on your face, like whatever happened to me happened to you. It got into my veins. It got in my blood. I have loved you,” he went on, his voice tight and rising, the words dropping from his lips like stones, “since the beginning of time. Since before that, maybe. You were born alone and found the world lacking, so you called out to me when I was unmade and pulled me into being. I am for you, I am _yours_. Jade, you are my heart.”

He had stopped pacing directly in front of me, shoulders square. He stared fiercely into my eyes. “Hasn’t any of it meant anything to you?” he asked, his voice breaking in pain as he spoke. “Fuck, I’ve been asking myself that since high school. How can you—how can you be so unaffected? So far away, so cold? Can’t you feel it, the thing between us, that tugging thing? Because it _burns_ me, Jade. I am part of you. I am.”

He waited for me to speak but I was speechless.

“I thought—after that night, after we were finally, finally together—I thought you wanted me.” His voice broken, pleading. “I thought you felt—”

I realized I did not need words to answer, not this time. I raised my hand to cup his chin, always so proud and strong. His skin was cold to the touch. He was soaked through. I pulled his mouth to mine, and pressed into his lips the things I did not have words for. His skinny, cold body yielded into mine, his frozen chest caving in against mine. He kissed me back as if the world depended on it. For us, it did.

“You’re freezing,” I said against his lips.

Davey reached up, slung his arms around my neck, and buried his face in my neck. He whispered, “Warm me up.”

*

An hour later we were tangled together in my bed, both quite a bit warmer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: Take my hand, I'll be everything to you; take my hand, I'll take everything from you.
> 
> (I won't lie, I had a really fun time just now reading Davey's line aloud dramatically. Would recommend.)


	25. Chapter 25

An hour later we were tangled together in my bed, both quite a bit warmer. I traced lines into his back with my fingertip, enjoying the way he arched like a cat to lean into my touch, enjoying the little gasps of breath he let out when I slid my thumb over his hip bone or his shoulder blade.

“Tomorrow cannot be like this,” he murmured. “I wouldn’t survive it. I want more than unsaid words, unspoken spaces. I want to be with you.”

I rubbed at the valleys threaded through his spine, at the notches between vertebrae. I frowned down at the silver shadowed skin. I did not know what he was asking.

I pressed my nose into the epicenter of his shoulder blades, fitting my face into his back, breathing the smell of rainwater and sweat off his skin.

 _I want that too_ , I wanted to say. I could not. I closed my eyes and saw a slideshow of faces, none of them Dave’s: Smith, Magnus, my dad, Gibson, all the girls I’d fucked and loved. My throat burned, a column of flame. I was suddenly, desperately, near to tears.

But I couldn’t pull away either. Ours bodies wrapped together, our skins fused, our heartbeats one. Our sins the same. I would never be able to extricate myself from him. I wanted wildly incompatible things.

Maybe he felt the three hot, stupid tears that fell on his back. Maybe he did not. He folded his arms under his chin, rested his head on his hands. “Join the band.” The words floated away from him, unmoored. “We need you.”

“Mark already—”

“Mark wants out. Ever since Geoff left he’s been looking for an excuse to get out. Join the band.”

 _My life is here_ , I had said, the last time he asked me to go with him. _My job, my band_. That had been ages ago, an album ago, a tour ago. I was not a fool. I knew how lucky I was, that he was asking again. My physical belongings were here, maybe, the guitar shop where I whiled away the hours. But my life, that essential spark of me, the thing that animated any moments that were not just listless and pale: that lived with him. I did not want to be pale and flat forever. The prospect of my life passing in brilliant flashes of Dave and those grey wastelands in between, that scared me far more than he did.

I found that strength to speak, lifting my lips from his skin. “What would I be to you, if I said yes? Your guitarist, your…?”

“Everything,” he said simply, sounding surprised I had to ask. “You’d be everything to me.” He rolled onto his back so he could look up at me. As ever, meeting his eyes took my breath away, stole my will, robbed my reason.

It was not a real answer. It was a sliver of poetry, gilded and honey-smooth but lacking any practical information. There was no definition, no title, no certainty. He spoke smoke and ether.

But it was Davey. I would not get a third opportunity to say no. And—I didn’t want to say no.

So I said yes.

*

A month or so later, at the end of their most recent tour, it became official. I quit my job, sold most of my things, pressed apologies upon my friends and obligations in Oakland. And then I was gone.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: I saw a star beneath the stairs, glowing through the melting walls.


	26. Chapter 26

A month or so later, at the end of their most recent tour, it became official. I quit my job, sold most of my things, pressed apologies upon my friends and obligations in Oakland. And then I was gone.

At that time, Davey and the others were renting a house in south Fullerton, in a neighborhood that bordered Anaheim and was half well-meaning Latino families, half terrifyingly broke hardcore kids latched onto L.A. like ticks on the neck of a feral dog. I had made fun of the Dutch shutters, dark paneling, and shag carpeting of Huntington Beach; but this house, if you could call it a house, strained my disbelief. I had to personally verify the house’s connection to the power grid before I would believe they weren’t squatting in a condemned derelict, had to see a receipt from the landlord before I believed Davey actually gave someone money for the dubious privilege of occupying that hellhole. The place was a shambles, its exterior walls cracked stucco with mold and moss and small cacti growing out of the rents, its floors, trim, and frames stained, rotting wood. The floors listed oddly, the rooms close and cramped. No breeze stirred through the sweating walls; paint bubbled and peeled from the damp in the summers, the musty smell intensifying. Being inside it gave the impression of being in the belly of a giant, creaking ship. The kitchen’s mullioned windows had lost so much glass that they were covered over with plastic, which distorted the sunlight, ballooned in the wind, and leaked even on dry days. The gas stove stayed hot enough to burn even when it was off while the furnace produced nothing but wails and groans. The water dribbled from the shower head, weak and orange and never raising a degree above tepid. Everything was either stained, crumbling, or sticky to the touch. The bathroom floors and walls were a mosaic of formerly garish tiles, blue and gold and red and teal, now discolored by rust and the growth of unspeakable horrors. The house’s only positive attribute was that it was unfurnished, and wasn’t filled with mildewed, hepatitis-infected couches and mattresses on top of everything else.

Naturally, Davey loved it.

When Davey described it to me on the phone, before I’d given up my apartment in Oakland—which, for the record, was rent-controlled, recently renovated, and unambiguously fit for human habitation—he neglected to mention most of these features. Instead, he told me it had four bedrooms, was affordable, was in a “vibrant” neighborhood, and was central to public transportation nodes. Instead, he waxed poetic about the Fox, a rundown old theater, abandoned in ’87, that was close enough to walk to, that had rotted-out window panes you could easily jimmy open with a pocket knife, that had dusty velvet curtains and grand decayed seats and a real stage and projection room. Davey has always been fascinated by beautiful things warped and blackened by time. He would have lived in a sewer, probably, if it was close to that damn theater.

When I saw it, the decayed corpse of an edifice Davey was trying to pass off as a house, I said, “No. Absolutely not.” I wouldn’t even get out of the car. Davey started unloading my luggage onto the overgrown, marshy lawn, appearing not to notice my horror and disgust. I rolled down my window to inform him, “I categorically refuse to live here.”

“It’s a bit of a fixer-upper,” he said cheerfully, flicking a lawn cockroach off of my suitcase. A _lawn cockroach_. “Great neighborhood, though,” he added, gesturing at the splendor of cracked pavement, graffitied cars, stolen street signs, dilapidated homes, and barred windows around us.

“A _bit of a fixer-upper_?” It was difficult to throw a tantrum while trapped behind my steering column, so I got out of the car. “ _This_ is a condemned building. This is a plague beast of a house. This looks like the place ghosts would take you in a horror movie right before they sucked out your soul and devoured your flesh.”

Davey considered the house for a moment, tipping his head slightly to the left. “We can make a chore schedule,” he suggested. I took his extreme calm as a personal affront.

“Consisting of what chores, exactly? Wrecking ball duty, fumigation, and DIY arson? You would have to scorch the earth, what, three times? four? to remove this level of blight. This is an ex-house. I cannot live here. I am not a necromancer and I will not live in a necromancer’s bloated cadaver of a house!”

Davey was trying very hard not to laugh at me, and doing a shit job of it. Maybe to a man who _still_ didn’t own any socks or know how to operate a dishwasher, a man who had spent the last several years living in ramshackle rentals or out of a bus with three other guys—maybe to him it was just another in a long line of hellish parodies of the word ‘home’. But over the years I had become accustomed to a certain standard of living.

“I can’t help but notice you’re not driving back to Oakland,” he said, snagging my hand from where it hung in the air at my side. He lifted it to his mouth, pressed his lips against its back. I scanned the house’s windows, relieved to find them empty.

“Give me a minute to catch my breath and I will,” I threatened, my palm snug against his. “This is not a splendor-in-decay type scenario, I want you to know. This is an airborne-pestilence type scenario. One of us should probably call the CDC.”

“Right after we get you unpacked,” he promised, smiling his temptress’ smile, all soft lips and suggestively gleaming eyes. “C’mon, let me show you your room. There’s this really neat mushroom growing in the closet. You’ll love it.”

Crossing myself for dramatic effect and muttering what I could remember of Psalm 23:4 under my breath, I followed him through the gaping stucco maw into the belly of the beast. Proving for the first time that I would always, every day, choose Davey over everything else. Proving for the first time that I would follow him anywhere. That I would do anything Davey asked of me, unconditionally, against my better judgment, for the rest of my life.

Well.

Except one thing.

*

We had separate bedrooms, on opposite ends of the house. This was largely to keep up appearances.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because Diva Davey is easy, uninteresting, and doesn't capture the part of him that loves Tim Burton and chooses derelict houses with creepy mirrors and graveyards for his photo shoots. (Although I think it's fairly obvious he's grown out of his up-close interest in squalor and decay.)  
> **  
> Next: I feel the light caress of fingertips that steal the breath and leave me on my own.


	27. Chapter 27

We had separate bedrooms, on opposite ends of the house. This was largely to keep up appearances. I had already lived entangled with Davey, our lives wrapped up together like a knot; I knew we did not need space from one another. Even so, dimly, in the back of my mind, I held a memory of his scorching words, his scathing look, what I had thought I perceived between him and Hunter—a memory of the ways he had proven he could hurt me. Buffing that memory with my thumb like a shiny burn scar, I was glad, too, to have my own room; to have just one thing that was all mine, unshared; to have a place I could hide. My thoughts, my heart, my music, my body: these were not places I could hide. Davey inhabited all of them. But that small, damp bedroom with the slanting ceiling and closet flora—that was mine.

“This is not a bedroom,” I informed Davey when he showed it to me. It was difficult to breathe the strongly musty air inside the tiny room, probably because of poisonous spores. The walls sparkled with mystery condensation. “This is an oubliette.”

Davey shoved his bangs back and rolled his eyes at me. He had realized, perhaps, that I was not pitching a fit to be funny; that I was serious in my horror at the squalor. Evidently he did not find this quality particularly charming. “You are beyond dramatic,” he informed me as I demonstrated the way I could not stand up fully in half of the room without hitting my head on the mold-speckled ceiling. “Look, you’ll be sleeping in my room anyway, so what does it matter?”

I sat down on the mattress against my better judgment. I could not think of a way to explain without offending him. _I don’t always know where I stand with you. We’ve never really tried being together, not for real. What if it doesn’t work?_

I am—have always been—a coward. What I said was, “I thought—I mean, we had discussed—publicly, I’m just the guitarist, not…”

And we had discussed it. We had agreed that, publicly, we didn’t want to be a band with a cause; we didn’t want to be a niche band, a gay band. We just wanted to be successful, to make the music we wanted, to have fans, to play shows. We agreed that, for the time being, it made more sense to just be bandmates. To appear to be just bandmates. We would worry about the rest when the future of the band was more certain. At that point we didn’t know how much our sound might change, with the recent lineup changes; how well my additions to the band would be received; if we would achieve commercial success, if we would alienate our fan base; if we were even _together_ in a dating kind of way. We had agreed that, whatever we were to each other, we would be it outside of the public eye. I cannot fully express my relief at this agreement. Farfetched as it was at the time, the idea of fame—the idea of magazine covers and press photos and the whole world knowing—the idea of my dad coming to a show, seeing Davey in his leather pants, or reading in the newspaper that his son was gay—the idea of him realizing this was the same kid he’d heard about in high school, the same rumors, that I was still the same pervert—that he’d let his kids near me—

But Davey waved his hand at all of this. I had agreed to come here, agreed to be everything to him. It was unthinkable that I would go on sleeping alone. “Publicly, sure,” he said. “But this isn’t public, Jade. This is our home.”

“Well in that case,” said I, and patted the diseased mattress beside me with a grin. “C’mere.”

*

There were things we didn’t know about each other, really, until I joined the band. Until we were together full-time, not just in stolen moments or handfuls of afternoons that we could grab, not just in whispers and half-blind nights. Sharing a bathroom with someone is possibly the quickest route to all their darkest secrets.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: But you made me realize my ticket wasn't good for two.


	28. Chapter 28

There were things we didn’t know about each other, really, until I joined the band. Until we were together full-time, not just in stolen moments or handfuls of afternoons that we could grab, not just in whispers and half-blind nights. Sharing a bathroom with someone is possibly the quickest route to all their darkest secrets.

I had always known Davey had sorrow in him, had a darkness at his core. I hadn’t known about the razor blades. They were in a tin of hair pomade, one of ten zillion tins and bottles and tubes that occupied every inch of counter, shelf, and rotted window ledge in the house’s moldy bathroom. They could only be his—neither Hunter nor Adam would buy something as ridiculous as Ultra Sheen Royal Crown Hair Pomade; only Davey and Italian grandfathers made such purchases. The tin rattled when I knocked it with the bottle of mousse I was sneakily replacing; when I opened it, there were the blades, dull matte metal but for their shining edge. I stared at them, trying to understand what they meant. It took a few tries, a few false starts, for the meaning to sink in.

I rifled through my memories next, searching for cuts that were precise and not haphazard, searching for regular scars. In what felt like a lifetime of orbiting Davey, I had touched the surface so few times; those moments when he bared all his skin to me had always been so feverish. I had not taken the time to catalogue each freckle, ridge, and crater. There was the scar on his knee that I so liked to brush with my thumb, the scar of our first meeting. There were chicken pox scars, somewhere. There was at least one burn. And there was the perfect, hair-thin bracelet that ringed his left wrist. This last was the only suspicion I could muster. As for fresh wounds, I couldn’t envision a single one.

There were so many things I could have done. Returned the razors and minded my own business, given the lack of evidence of risk. Stolen them quietly, wordlessly, and let him work it out himself—and wouldn’t his anger at the discovery of their loss reveal his own ill intentions? I could have just _asked_ , with kindness and understanding. In those days he would have told me. But the thought of Davey spilling his own blood gripped me, like a fist squeezed around my guts, and I stormed straight to the place I had seen him last without a thought.

“What the fuck,” I said. Accused. I threw the rattling pomade tin onto the slanted dining room table. It skidded to a halt a few inches from where he sat. Davey looked up from the notebook he was bent over, sliding his headphones off his ears and down around his neck. His brow was furrowed, his eyes quick and dark as they took in the tin and the look on my face, the rigid angles of my body, the fists hanging white at my sides.

“Hmm,” he hummed, apparently to himself, laying down his pen carefully and studying my expression. He picked up his mug and took a thoughtful sip of tepid coffee.

“Well?” I snarled. Nothing got under my skin as quickly as Davey playing calm, rational, all-knowing. Nothing made me escalate faster than Davey treating me like an unreasonable, dramatic child. When _he_ was angry about something, it was all wildfire and catastrophes, beating our chests, rending our clothes, and tearing at our hair in sorrow; when I raised my voice he would meet it with this long-suffering stare, this tired and calm tone of voice, this air of _oh Jade, not again with your silly tantrums_. Which tended to incite me to silly tantrums.

“Have you been going through my things?” asked the all-knowing voice of reason. My blood lashed against my veins, boiling.

“Stealing hair products, actually.” I spoke through clenched teeth, trying to match his eerie calm. It was a feeble attempt. “Answer the question.”

“Was a question posed?” he asked, doing quizzical eyebrows in the most infuriating manner possible.

“Let me rephrase,” I replied acidly. “What the fuck are these, what the fuck do you need them for, and what the fuck are they doing in our bathroom.”

Davey’s lips turned into a small, neat frown. His face betrayed nothing. The angrier I got, the more he turned to stone. “They’re… in case of emergency,” he said. His voice was tight, the only hint that there was feeling underneath his calm.

“And you couldn’t just keep them in your bedroom, where no one else will find them, where no one might accidentally discover them and be forced to make a scene? You _wanted_ me to—” The look on his face stopped me cold. I took a breath. I tried to force myself calm to match, knowing that I would get nothing out of him through brute force. “I am _worried_ about you. I am scared and I am confused and I don’t know—I don’t know the part of you that anticipates emergencies requiring easy-access razor blades. _Okay_?” Instead of calm, the words came out like a challenge. Dave sighed as if exhausted.

“I am happy for you, that you can’t imagine that kind of emergency,” he said. “I am happy for you that you spring out of bed each morning without a moment of pause or regret or soul-draining struggle. I am happy for you that you never lay awake at night imagining life without you in it, imagining sinking into sleep and never getting up again. I am happy for you that you have never felt tired, so tired that simply carrying on is a Sisyphean ordeal, so tired that the idea of existing for another second more is unbearable. I haven’t used them in ages, Jade, and I’ve never used them while—while I was with you. So just put them back where you found them, please. Don’t make this—don’t make this into a thing.”

I snatched the tin off the tabletop and shook it, so the blades rattled inside. I showed my teeth in a crazed sort of grin. “ _I’m_ the one making it into a thing! Oh I see.” My voice was loud, too loud. The sounds of Hunter muddling around on his bass from the living room had ceased. “You want to have the means to kill yourself just casually on hand at any given moment, and I’m the one—you’re right, you’re absolutely right, I’m being ridiculous.” Sarcastic words spewed out of me, stinging caustic on my lips. He flinched as they landed. I didn’t care that I was hurting him—I wanted to hurt him, even. Sometimes I think our whole lives have just been different ways of hurting each other, every moment a weapon, every memory a knife. I wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him. I was too afraid to put my hands so near his throat. Wildly, madly thinking, if he wanted to die so badly, maybe I’d just kill him.

The thought sobered me, stilled me, in a way that my own efforts to reason with myself could not. I dropped myself heavily into the chair across the table from him, fingers still wrapped tight around the stupid tin. I had the urge to apologize but refused it on principle. “Anyone who wants to hurt you is my enemy,” I said, much more quietly than I had been speaking before. I couldn’t quite meet his eyes, so I looked at the tabletop instead, looked at his pale hands and bitten fingernails, his discarded pen and chipped mug and notebook flowing with his messy, spidery hand. Even without looking higher than the table’s edge there was so much there that was dear to me. The idea of losing it, even the tiniest piece, was beyond terrifying; it was a sliver of ice in my heart. It sunk into my soul and parted my spirit with a soft, aching sigh. To even contemplate it was a kind of loss. I thought but did not say, _I would give up anything to protect you. Even from you._

“Shall we fight, then?” he asked wryly, a tiny smile concealed at the corner of his mouth. “Will you hurt me, to stop me from hurting me?”

“I’m keeping this,” I told him, shaking the tin again.  
Dave cocked his head slightly. “What stops me from just getting more?”

“If you want them—if you need them—you can ask.” I met his eyes at last, knowing that my gaze was strong and would not waver. “You can come to me with your emergency. If we can’t think of a better solution, you can have them. I won’t stop you. But I—I don’t want you to be alone. I don’t want you to decide alone.”

Davey reached across the table to put his hands on top of mine. I thought for a moment he would take the tin from me and I prepared to fight. But he only laid his hands on mine, stroking the backs of my hands lightly, squeezing my fingers in his. I could not read the look in his eyes. I could not hear beyond the sorrow in his voice. If there was any gratitude, or love, or relief—I did not hear it.

“All right,” he said, agreeing in a way that made me feel I had committed an unforgivable trespass, that I had perpetrated a violation and not an act of love. He agreed as if he would never trust me again, not fully. As if I had failed some test of understanding. And I _didn’t_ understand. Had he wanted me to find them? Had he wanted me to know? Why else would he keep them there, in a bathroom we all shared, right on the counter in plain sight? I imagined coming home one day, finding his body empty of blood on the floor, pale and broken. I imagined the spreading stain beneath him. I imagined never seeing his smile again. There was no stopping that. I knew it. Taking one blade only meant he’d find another. There were so many ways he could hurt himself, so many different embraces for human fragility. There were so many paths to mortality that I felt suffocated, thinking of them all. Thinking of all the ways I might find him dead, one day, if I had failed this test.

There are so many different ways to lose someone.

“All right,” he said. But it wasn’t.

*

We were young then. We healed quickly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: Holding me down, you bought my rebirth.


	29. Chapter 29

We were young then. We healed quickly. Arguments were short and soon forgotten. For me, those were golden days, bright and full of beginnings. We were just beginning to write together, shifting tentatively between voice and instrument, trying to match words to strings. We tried this in the practice space at first, Hunter coming and going in his grocery stockboy uniform, Adam cocking his head inquisitively as our shaky missteps reached his ears. I imagined them thinking, Davey must be out of his mind; this guy will never get out sound right.

The first time I imagined this it stung me. The second time, it clicked into place like a plug fitting snugly into a socket. With the connection made, current could flow. I realized they—my paranoid projections of my new bandmates, that is—were right. I couldn’t reproduce their sound, not in a fresh or even convincing way. I wasn’t a cover artist. I could mimic them, sure, but that would sound like mimicry—not music. And, when I listened closely, I realized that I could not put my heart into the way AFI had always sounded, because I didn’t believe there was much _there_. It was hollow, a brittle, crumbling eggshell. Anger is only so much substance. You cannot live on it; it cannot, forever, sustain you. I wanted to play something with life pulsing through it, something that Davey could really sing to. Something that suited the man he had grown into, not just the angry boy he once was.

So I scrapped those faltering, uneasy riffs I’d been wrestling with. I listened, really listened, to Davey’s lyrics. I was distracted by the half-melody he read them with, his voice thickening with bile when he read the lines he thought would be the chorus. Following his lead wasn’t working. One day while he was out I rifled through his notebook of lyrics and poems. I rolled the words through my head, thumbing muted strings, breathing coppery steel and patiently waiting for the words to resolve into something I could play.

Absorbed in this work, I did not hear Davey come home. I was gingerly picking out the notes that would eventually become Malleus Malleficarum. Even from the first overdriven chord, you could hear the difference. The guitar, spokesman of the music, had its own voice in this song—not to rival Davey’s, but to complement it, to ebb and flow within it and draw it out in a way Mark’s guitar simply had not. It did not sound like the songs on their previous records. It did not sound totally different, either.

“What are you playing?” Davey’s voice came on my third trip through the intro, as I built confidence to tackle the bridge. The notes were growing stronger. The percussion and the bassline were swelling up around me, imagined but full of promise. Startled, I slapped my hand over the strings, silencing the evidence.

I felt sheepish but not sorry. I was changing his work without his permission, but I was improving it too. I was writing the notes that would take separate musicians and make them a band.

I felt myself grinning in spite of my warm blush. “This one,” I said, sliding his notebook towards him across the bed. Davey scanned the page quickly, his expression cloudy, unreadable.

“This is just a poem,” he said. “Not a song.”

“Shows what you know,” I said, all grin now. I started from the top, bolder with his eyes on me. His presence made the fledgling song pour out fuller, more certain, with more speed and energy. It sounded like him, his band, but now it sounded like me, too—the sounds winding together, greater than the sum of their parts.

“Open my eyes as I submerge,” I sang tentatively, prompting. My voice was always lower and softer than his, as if asking permission. “I won’t deny what I’ve been since birth.”

But Dave didn’t join in. He just stared down at the notebook. My stomach sank a little. I silenced my guitar with my palm. Were we going to have another argument about privacy? I felt a pang of preemptive shame for helping myself to Davey’s notebook.

Davey asked, “Why this one?” He looked up sharply, meeting my eyes. “Why did you choose these words?”

It was hard to explain in words the way it had made me feel, the way it had drawn music like strands of gold from somewhere deep in me. It was easier to express that feeling with a guitar, but maybe he hadn’t heard it. “It felt important,” I said at last. The goofy, elated grin of writing well was still stuck crookedly to my face. “It felt like coming to see you—two years ago, remember, when you recorded Shut Your Mouth? I could taste the air, in the words. It felt like it was about me. Like they were words I’d have said, if I could write like you do. And…” I let my voice trail off, my fingers on strings taking over as I picked up the melody, compelled by sincerity to express to him what I was feeling in my native tongue.

There was a light in Dave’s face as he looked at me. I had the sense he had heard more than I had said. And then the light turned outward and he was grinning, just beaming at me. He bounded to the bed and dove across the mattress, notebook held out in front. “What else have you got?” he asked happily. “I want to help. Make music out of me.”

*

After that first song, Davey and I regularly spent our days stretched out on that crappy mattress, stripped down to boxers and briefs to escape the skin-sticking fug of summer in LA, me with a guitar and he with his voice.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: On the way, I saw five hours of sleep. But your fire makes it all worth while. On the way, I wrote words for you to keep.


	30. Chapter 30

After that first song, Davey and I regularly spent our days stretched out on that crappy mattress, stripped down to boxers and briefs to escape the skin-sticking fug of summer in LA, me with a guitar and he with his voice. It became so common for us to call in sick to our respective inglorious jobs when the writing was going well that we were both eventually fired. Despite the implications of unemployment for our rent and ability to buy new strings and studio time, we were serenely undisturbed by the news. It was more time, more time to explore song and skin, more time to fuse ourselves together every way we could think of, in spirit as in flesh.

Once, I remember, he inked lyrics on my skin with a felt-tip marker. Who knows if they’d have turned out any good; we became distracted when the marker reached the sensitive skin spanning my narrow, bony hips. Another time we pressed our twin tattoos together, our skin stirring and speeding as it seemed to whenever we touched. What we called songwriting often turned into something else. And how could it not? We were sharing souls, each pouring into the other with the sweetest sound. We were entangling our whole selves. He spoke his sharpest words into the hollow of my gasping throat; I heard the clearest notes while he moved inside me. Writing, Davey, music, sex—it was all tangled into one thing. And I had never written so well, never composed anything so true or sound. Those days of creative outpouring and unbounded sex and first forging the paths that would become second nature to us with time, those were the happiest days I’d ever known.

When we brought our work to the rest of the band we all just fell together, like instead of four musicians we were a single organ, pulsing with the same life, a life that spilled over into sound. We were golden in those days. I had always been talented at the guitar. I had never written good music before. AFI was more than a good band—we were full of our own potential. We felt it, tasted it, lived in its charged air. It filled our practices, our nights, our days. The future spread out before us, the universe unraveled at our pleasure, like the night at Low Gap when we looked down on the city and felt our brief, incandescent lives burning inside us. I had the sense that anything I had ever wanted in life was simply a matter of reaching out; for there was every bliss imaginable, right at our fingertips.

Davey was beside me and the world was ours.

My midnight trips to his room—my nights spent in his bed—our afternoons that flowed from composing to fucking and back again—they turned out not to be much of a secret, for all the sneaking. I learned this over breakfast one morning, when Hunter plunked his cereal bowl down across from me and said, “So it sounds like the sex is good.” He said this conversationally, with the start of a mischievous grin on his smug pink lips. I choked on my coffee and crumbs of banana bread.

I should explain—in those days we were together and separate at once. At night, we belonged to one another completely. During the day, there were women. Davey always had someone, at least one someone, following him around with parted lips and hooded eyes, the flickering reflection of his glow making their faces soft with something closer to worship than love. Teenage death girls, teenage death boys. Even before our true fame hit, fame beyond our wildest dreams, there were sweet, adoring fans eager to float around after him, borne up upon his energy and life like he was some kind of happy goth zephyr. I did not ask him which ones he kissed, which ones he fucked. It was easy enough to guess, by the placement and frequency of casual touches, by the yellow desperation that began to color their faces as their need for him consumed them, by the speed at which they flowed in and out of favor. Some of them, he simply used up. I know he never meant to. That was just who he was. Who he is. I know; time and again I watched it happen.

How did I never see it happening to me? We can be so blind, when we want to be. When we need it.

So Hunter. Sitting across our heavy old table. Eating puffed corn cereal with an irascible grin on his face. Hunter, who I had come into fondness for very quickly, once I was assured Davey did not love him. The fucking of his followers, the impassioned conversations, even the small tender touches of tucking stray locks of hair behind their ears—those things I could live with. Loving, though. Loving like the Wheeler fire. To receive Davey’s love was unforgiveable.

( _Did I think I was superior to them? Yes. Of course. I had to, to survive. To see myself in them would have been to court my own destruction. Which I did. Which, ultimately, anyway, I did._ )

Hunter, with his cereal and his smugness. Hunter saying like it was a comment about the respective string quality of steel vs. nylon. Hunter showing teeth saying, _sounds like the sex is good_.

I choked. I purpled. I lied.

“What are you _talking_ about?” My incredulity a hard sell, with rasping voice from startled choking. With bruise-dark imprints of his sucking mouth on my throat, shoulders, chest. Surreptitiously I rested my chin in my hand, to cast hickeys into mystery and shadow. I thought to myself, you should cultivate the reputation for accessorizing with scarves. Avoid these situations altogether.

There is a pattern, here. When I cannot cope, you may have noticed, I detach. I lie. Whenever possible I run away. I looked down at the half-eaten banana bread on a plate before me. I weighed the odds of making a clean getaway. I debated whether fleeing the scene or sticking around to protest too much would be more suspicious.

Hunter looked openly delighted at my racing discomfort. “The sounds coming from Davey’s room at night? All night? Every night? And afternoon?” I flinched at every word, if the pleasure on his face was the judge.

“You’re confused,” I told him primly. Prim and purple and shading my throat conspicuously with my hand. “We—we write. I mean if the sound bothers you, we can leave it to more regular hours. The writing. Davey’s—um—vocal exercises—can be… loud.”

“Beastlike, almost,” said Hunter, grinning like a beast himself. “Sometimes it sounds like wild animals in there. Vocal exercises? Really?” This with the air of _is that the best you can come up with?_. I counted fourteen teeth in his unnatural smile.

Intimidated by those teeth, white and straight and taking no shit, white and straight and seeing right through me, I pushed back my chair and stood. Awkwardly, abruptly. Worse, it turned out in the second after I chose it, than sticking around to protest too much. “This is a fucked-up way to talk to a friend,” I told him, voice low and tight with inexplicable anger.

Hunter’s teeth vanished and the rest of him remained. The opposite of the Cheshire cat. “Yeah, it is,” he said back. His voice was serious and calm. As effortlessly as that, he turned my words back on me, whose chest they pounced on, whose breath they cut in to, whose heart they sliced.

Shaking with anger I could not understand any better than I could express, I left my breakfast behind. I walked and then ran down the sloping low-ceilinged hallway to my damp room, my sorry mildewed refuge. I wanted to scream and rage, to throw myself onto my bed and bitterly weep. I wanted to call up the girl I was ostensibly seeing and fuck her in the living room, up against Hunter’s door. I wanted to goad Davey into a fight, see if I could get his fists up, see if I could get him to split my lip. I wanted to call up my dad’s house and just breathe, heavy and unidentified, and listen to the fear climb in his voice. I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t understand the person I was.

So I picked up my guitar. I clutched it alongside my inaccessible anguish. I tangled them up together, shoved my thoughts _out_ , and I began to play.

*

And listen—it wasn’t just me, orbiting Davey, and all else, the black void of space.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, I just can't resist a scarf dig when it's presented. It's a sickness. Next: From all we've been shunned but we found a new home. To great discontent it is greatness that we own.


	31. Chapter 31

And listen—it wasn’t just me, orbiting Davey, and all else, the black void of space.

Hunter and I—we’re the same kind of musician. Which is to say that we’re both hands-on, all-in, poring over and pouring into every metaphysical square inch of the process. All instruments fair game, and sound booths and drum machines at our fingertips, and remixing tracks for fun in our free time: Hunter and I both are the kind who, above loyalty to any one thing, prefer to crawl inside the space where music is made. To inhabit, not the music itself, but its process, its birth, its creation. That is a different kind of fanaticism than the solid, single-entity, monolithic approach of Dave and Adam. Their fever lies more in the blood than the infrastructure, more in the heartbeat than the system it supports. What I’m getting at is that, generally speaking, Hunter and I got along like a house on fire. His sense of humor—the mix of legitimate weirdness and deadpan teasing and social awkwardness that had so intimidated me at first—isn’t much different from mine. Then, as now, Hunter and I had fun together. We would do band stuff, we would wax poetic about stage effects and concerts we’d been to, we would climb on statues and play stupid pranks, we would fall off our skateboards and compare gnarliness of wounds, we would watch TV and eat pizza and talk about our dreams. All that stuff that you do, when you’re 25 and really settling into the rhythm of who you are and tackling your life’s ambition with your like-minded peers. We did that. Our lives weren’t entirely composed of stardust and angst; we did that stuff too.

Adam and I were different, not just musically, but in temperament. He has an ability to be _present_ in a moment, to be grounded, to always know the measure of what he’s said, what he’s done, what kind of man he is. It took me years to name that quality in him, but that’s best as I can put it into words. Adam is entirely, thoroughly himself, and to all appearances derives a great deal of peace from that. I used to tease him, used to ask if he was some kind of monk. Because I’ve always lived tied up in so many knots that I couldn’t imagine being smooth, easy, uncomplicated. Because the one thing I’ve never, ever been certain of is me.

That difference between us—that ability he had to be genuine while my entire self was carefully balanced artifice—didn’t serve to alienate us. AFI never would have worked if we had held ourselves separate, held ourselves apart. Had to be _a part_ instead. But we didn’t click right away. It took a while for me to get a read on him, for me to relax around him. I didn’t trust that kind of Bay-on-a-still-day calm.

So it’s easy to pinpoint the day we became friends. I had entered the house, the band, on somewhat awkward terms. I knew the guys from doing backing vocals and from, as I say, orbiting Dave. I knew Adam, remembered liking him, from high school. But I felt an interloper, too big to fit, like the time spent under Davey’s sheets was obvious. Like it branded me. It is hard to make friends with people when you are convinced they can see the stain of your sickness on your skin, that their perception of you is filtered through almighty disgust and horror, that they have seen the true thing that you are and are _revolted_. As anyone would be.

Not long after Hunter confronted me at the breakfast table, I got a call from my brother, from Gibson. He was seventeen at the time and, in some ways, in awe of me. I was the mystery brother, the one in a band, who rarely showed up for family parties or holidays. It seemed like a cool sort of disinterest, maybe; like my life was vastly too exciting for me to be bothered with Thanksgiving. Not like I was too afraid to show my face, in case they could tell just by looking that I took it in the ass sometimes, that I slept with my male bandmate, that I had years ago thrown up on the front porch of my sociology professor after we kissed. You know—rational fears.

So Gibson, who didn’t know much about me by design, who I had held as an infant, played with as a child, and watched grow into a man from a distance; who I loved ferociously and believed I had to protect; he called me and he said, “Dad’s hurt.”

“Hurt how?” It was one of those moments your thoughts slow down, like cake batter, like spilled glue or cold molasses. I could hear his words but I could not understand them.

“He was driving to work,” Gibson recited, words dropping mechanically from a numb tongue. “He lost consciousness. He went across three lanes of traffic, into a ditch, into a tree. Car’s totaled. They’re saying he’d have broken half his bones if he’d been awake to tense up.” He took a breath, paused. I knew there was a script, knew I wasn’t following it. But my knowledge ended there.

“It was a stroke,” Gibson continued once he realized I wasn’t going to ease things along. “Apparently. He’s in the hospital until they can figure out why it happened, if it’s going to happen again, and… and the extent of the damage.”

When I thought of my father. When I pictured him in my head. He was always enormous, looming over me. I felt very small, next to the muscle and girth of a grown man. I felt shriveled and scrawny. I was always short, when I thought of myself in relation to him; I was always small. In the physical world, I’d outgrown him by five inches by the time I left high school. But in my thoughts, he was a giant, red-faced and bellowing, promising that if a word of it was true, if I showed my face again, he’d make me regret it.

Stupidly, irrationally, I wondered if this was what he meant. I thought, _this never would have happened if I’d stayed away from Davey_. I thought, _this is all my fault_. I knew it wasn’t true just as certainly as I knew I’d made it happen.

I thought, _maybe I killed him_. And I thought, _maybe things would be easier that way_.

I couldn’t say that to Gibson, though. So I parroted back what he’d said. “Damage?”

“His speech is slurred. And he's... confused.” Gibson’s voice was getting smaller and smaller on the line. “The doc says that means… that there may have been permanent damage… to some areas of Dad’s brain.”

I heard his voice splinter as if it would shatter and realized what I was doing, what I was making _him_ do. Why had Gibson called me with this news and not Smith, not my stepmom, not my mother? Not to talk about Dad’s medical prognosis. I heard the hurt in him and stopped asking stupid questions.

Instead I asked a useful one. I said, “What do you need me to do?”

Inside the hour I was pacing up and down the cramped, slanting sinkhole I called a bedroom, all the clothing I owned hurricaned out around me, an increasingly empty duffle bag on the mattress. My hands were in my hair. I was very close to panic. It was of utmost import that I not cry.

My face red, my eyes bulging half out of my head while I panted, paced, ground my teeth together in unhinged agony. This was the tableau Adam interrupted. This paroxysm of madness, this total discomposure.

And what he said was, “I’d ask if you were okay, but I can see you’re not.”

I froze in my caged-animal anguish. I had a split second to decide: issue a transparent lie feebly designed to keep Adam at bay, in case he sussed out the true root of my panic, in case he heard the same things Hunter did; or take the help I so desperately needed. Davey wasn’t there and I probably couldn’t have explained it to him if he was. But Adam was neutral, and steady, and calm.

My voice small as I said, “I’m not.”

My admission an invitation, Adam took a step into the room. “I’d ask if you needed help, but I can see that you do.” The corner of his mouth quirked in a smile that was absent of humor or malice. It was a smile of sad knowing, wry upon his kind face.

My voice smaller as I said, “I do.”

Adam set to work without commenting on the disastrous state of my bedroom. He began folding t-shirts briskly and placing them in the duffel bag. “How many days are you going for?” he asked. I felt my face stave in in response.

How many days did it take, to decide whether your father was irrevocably changed, to settle within yourself how likely he was to die and whether you could take the risk that he might, to negotiate that struggle and then, deciding, make a kind of peace and say goodbye? How many days was one required to keep vigil at his father’s bedside, to grip the shoulders of his younger brothers in silence that at once comforted and chilled, to tolerate the weeping of a stepmother whose heartbreak he did not share?

The shock that had frozen my tongue for the last hour shattered. Adam folded my t-shirts and laid them in my bag, working as if nothing about the arrangement struck him as odd, and words rushed up through my lumpy throat and into the air. “My fucking dad. No, god, I shouldn’t say it like that, I regret—it’s—my dad. He lost control of his car, or his consciousness, or—that’s not the important part—a stroke!” The word bursting free like a klaxon, following by a choking sob that I almost-but-not-quite swallowed back down. Adam did not waver in his neat, methodical packing. “They don’t know,” I said around the tears I could not fight, “how bad it was. Yet. He can’t speak right. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

Adam moved on to jeans, black and thin-legged. I watched him place them in the duffel even though I knew I couldn’t wear them around my dad. Baggy blue jeans and band tees, that was my uniform for my father. It was the closest I could bring myself to overalls and plaid. Or whatever normal was. I didn’t know how to tell Adam that, though, as he glanced surreptitiously between my stonewashed bootcut dad jeans and the tight dark denim I was wearing. His hand wavered above the dad jeans and then he left them wrinkled on the bed, clearly undesirable, grabbing a pair of tight black slacks instead. I didn’t know how to tell him _my dad can’t see me as me_. Even I didn’t know how to put it into words.

“It sounds like he’s regained consciousness?” Adam said. I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t even thought to ask. Too busy thinking about my own fucking self, as usu—“If he’s speaking, he must have.” Adam’s warm, matter-of-fact voice pulled me back, again and again, from the brink of self-absorbed, pitiful wallowing. “That’s good news,” Adam went on firmly. “That means the oxygen supply to his brain wasn’t cut off for too long.” He laid in a third pair of pants and hesitated for a moment before declaring, “Well, even if you’re there for a week, you can get by on three pairs of pants. Where are you staying?”

“I don’t know that either,” I admitted.

Adam took this in stride. “Well, the underwear problem is pretty much solved if you’re somewhere with a washing machine. Do you have family you can stay with?”

My stomach turned over at the thought of sleeping in my dad’s house, a prospect I had largely avoided and endured with dread only a handful of times in the last eight years. But there were beds there, and laundry facilities. I remembered a Christmas, years ago, when Smith and I crammed into Gibson’s bed with him, determined to keep each other awake with sharp elbows and cold heels so we wouldn’t miss Santa. That was before I had established myself as a known pervert.

I could sleep on Gibson’s floor, I supposed. I could leave before my dad was sent home and found out, before he had the glimmer of a thought that I was a predator, that I was a threat to my own half-brother. Before he could entertain the idea that I was sick and it was catching.

Some of the torture must have shown on my face because Adam stopped folding socks and studied me. “You know you don’t have to go, don’t you?”

“My younger brother,” I said, voice thick and muffled by tears. “I said I’d be there.”

Adam tipped his head to one side, considering. “That doesn’t mean you have to stay,” he suggested slowly. “How long’s the drive?”

“Eight hours. Even without traffic, it’s over seven. And there’s always traffic.” I heard the misery in my own voice. “After the drive and the… hospital… I’ll be exhausted. I won’t be in any state to drive back.”

The smile on Adam’s face was real now. Finally, I had presented a problem he could solve. “So I’ll do the drive home.”

I stared at him in dumb comprehension. His smile widened. “I won’t hang around unless you want me to,” he said. “I can always find something to do in the Bay. And if something changes and you have to stay, we can stay with my parents.” Misreading the astonishment on my face, he hastened to assure me, “They’re nice, really! A little weird—parents—and each unbearable in their own way, you know—but nothing out of the ordinary. They’d love having you. After all the years of Dave sleeping over, they’ll be amazed at how normal you are.”

Finally I found words to attach to my shock. Words that were not good, adequate, or even comprehensible, but words. “That’s—you don’t have to—no one’s ever—”

But Adam brushed me off. “I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t mean it, Jade. Truly. You grab whatever overnight stuff you need from the bathroom and I’ll make a thermos of coffee. We’ll hit the road in 15. Okay?”

I tried to insist I’d be fine on my own, that he didn’t need to inconvenience himself in such a huge way. But when I opened my mouth what came out was, “Okay.”

*

Standing over my father’s body imbued me with a peculiar strength.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: The kingdom of the flies.


	32. Chapter 32

Standing over my father’s body imbued me with a peculiar strength.

Sleeping, he looked deflated. Wrinkles bristled with silver stubble, etching his grey sunken face like a shelf of crumbling sandstone. His arms rested atop his blanket, stringy and thin, his skin sagging sideways off the bone. His hands like those of a much older man, yellow and withered. Tubes protruded at all angles, cloudy with pus-colored fluids, carrying the vitality out of my father’s body. I looked into his sleeping face and saw very little to be afraid of. Saw very little I even recognized.

I glanced back at Adam, standing solidly beside the door. Anyone else would have been ill at ease in his position, but Adam looked certain and comfortable, feet planted, shoulders square, arms crossed over his chest. His drummer’s muscle stood out, hard angles jutting vitally out of his t-shirt sleeves, a stark contrast to my paper-thin father. Gibson was slumped in a chair at Dad’s beside. Smith dozed indecorously on the tile floor, using a balled-up sweatshirt as a pillow. Alisha had taken my stepmother home for a shower, a proper meal, and a few hours’ sleep.

In this room, with the dim lights and the softly beeping monitors, I wondered why it mattered so much to me, what this man thought. Opinions housing in failing, fading meat. Didn’t Davey make me happy? Wasn’t that worth fear, disgust, rejection, stigma?

My resolve flickered before I reached the end of the list. It was 1998, post-Stonewall, post-AIDS, but still an era of discrimination and violence, of “don’t ask, don’t tell” as the best protection. If I could not tolerate the revulsion of my father—of this single decaying organism—if I could not even risk the loss of Gibson and Alisha, how would I cope, in the public eye? If everyone I’d ever met and everyone who heard our music or saw our show _knew_ the thing I hadn’t ever allowed myself to even shape into words?

This time when I glanced at Adam I did not take comfort—I felt a shivering lurch of fear instead. How did it look, that I’d brought him? Did my family suspect? Friends—friends did not come along to visit ailing fathers. I felt wrong-footed as all my choices slid to the ill. How had I made such an obvious error, such a fool’s choice? My skin tightened, cold. Anyone looking could see, I had put both Adam and myself in danger.

My father’s eyes opened. I recoiled. “Jade,” he said, softmouthed, my name mushy and fuzzed. He reached out for me, hand tremoring. I felt that I would absorb death from his skin if he touched me.

I drew back just enough that his IV-tethered arm could not reach me. Jerkily, his hand dropped. “My boy.” The hand opened and closed spasmodically, grasping at the folds of the blankets. I couldn’t look away from its tortured efforts.

“Hey, Dad,” I bit out. Gibson shifted in his chair, red-eyed but alert. I watched my father’s hand and didn’t know why I had come. What comfort could I possibly offer? It was all I could do stand beside him.

“Gibson said,” he began, frowning at the mangled way the sibilants dragged from his slobbery lips. “Gibson said you were spending the holiday with your mother.”

Gibson made a sound halfway between a snarl and a sob. He had been there for close to ten hours. “I told you, it’s October,” he said forcefully. “That was last year—last Christmas. It’s 1998.”

He looked at me helplessly, agitation giving way to sorrow. “He keeps getting confused,” Gibson said. “Sometimes he’s perfectly lucid and then he thinks it’s a year ago. A few times he hasn’t even recognized—”

“I’m right here,” Dad interrupted loudly, aggressively. He looked more like himself with the flush of blood returning to his cheeks. His hand kept working pointlessly at the blanket. “Don’t talk about me like I’m an invalid.”

Dad grew louder. “The doctors say his memory—” Gibson began shakily.

“I DON’T GIVE A SHIT WHAT THE DOCTORS SAY,” Dad shouted. Smith jerked awake, sitting up bewildered with his mohawk curling over like the fin of a captive whale. Gibson set his jaw, tears streaming down well-worn tracks on his cheeks. I looked to Adam for some kind of guidance, but he had vanished.

“Dad, calm down. It’s Jade,” I said stupidly, trying to recapture the pleasure and recognition that had been on his face a moment ago.

“Do you THINK I’M AN IDIOT? I KNOW WHO YOU ARE,” he bellowed, and I’d gotten too close, and his palsied hand caught hold of me, grip feeling impossibly strong on my wrist. “NOW WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING USEFUL FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YOUR LIFE AND GET ME OUT OF HERE.”

I tore free of his grip, angry and stunned, and Dad slumped back onto his pillows like I’d jerked the batteries out of his back. There was fear on his face instead of rage as he said, slurring, “Please, boys, please, get me out of here. It’s these damn doctors, they’re putting something in—everything is fuzzy, and I keep slipping. I just want to go home. I feel _wrong_. Please take me home.”

Gibson’s face was in his hands, his shoulders shaking. I wanted to comfort him but I was frozen, watching my father whimper like a child, scared and confused, knowing something had changed in that organ of existence, the seat of his consciousness, but unable to recognize it from inside. The stroke must have been worse than Gibson had let on, I decided. It seemed obvious to me that this was not my father.

When Adam returned, it was with a somber, white-coated woman in tow. “This is Dr. Benikyar,” he said firmly. “She is going to explain what they think happened in your dad’s brain and what stroke recovery usually looks like.” He fixed the doctor with an imploring look and emphasized, “Particularly the rapid gains most patients experience as the initial disorientation wears off and the excess fluid drains away from the site of the infarction.”

And that is what happened. Adam brought everyone coffees and Dr. Benikyar patiently explained what they knew about my father’s stroke and what they anticipated for his recovery. I sat as near to Gibson as I thought would appear decent and brotherly, nudging him with my shoulder in an encouraging manner whenever the doctor gave us positive news. Dad cycled through anger, fear, and confusion a few more times that evening, but he was himself more than not—his hand spasmed and his voice dragged through syllables, but he was generally oriented and calm, telling weak jokes and expressing how glad he was to see us all together. He tried to brush off our concern, insisting we had other things to worry about. “Don’t you have an album coming out soon? Get back to it!” he urged me a few times, and I was touched that he even knew, let alone that he thought of it at a moment like this.

There were bad moments too, like when he slid agitatedly back in time and noticed Adam and hollered inchoately about how he wasn’t welcome here, about how he had warned me and he wouldn’t have it under his roof, near his family. I couldn’t look at Smith or Gibson while he yelled these things. But then, neither could they look at me when he turned on them about hairstyles and shiftlessness and lack of ambition and cigarettes.

Smith and I persuaded Gibson to leave his bedside only once Alisha and their mother had returned. He passed out in the car; Adam helped him into my father’s house and into bed. “Come inside,” Smith urged me in the driveway. “We’ll camp out on the floor. It’ll be all the fun you missed the last few Christmases and more.”

“I can’t,” I said inadequately. When had I ever been brave enough to leave the safety of my car? To face what was inside?

“Because of what Dad said? He’s not himself, Jade.”

“Oh, that part is all him. I’ve met that version before.” I kept my hands on the steering wheel, eyes straight ahead. “When he turned me out of his house and warned me away from his family. I should have listened then.”

“How long are you gonna punish yourself for something that happened when you were 17?” Smith had also had a long and painful day, was equally short on patience.

Perhaps due to the emotional rawness, perhaps due to my own exhaustion, I spoke a truth aloud that I’d planned never to say. “It wasn’t just when I was 17,” I said. “I meant it to be, but—but something in me is badly wrong. I can’t stop. Sometimes I don’t even want to stop. Dad made it clear to me, years ago and ever since, that I’m not welcome under his roof if… Anyway. I should have listened to him.”

Smith leaned into the front of the car, his big goofy grin an inch from my face. I couldn’t understand what he was so fucking happy about.

“You and Dave?” he asked excitedly, beaming. “Still? I knew it! I knew it. I spent a lot of time with that kid in high school, you know. I always thought you would be really, really good together—but I figured you’d never get over yourself enough to—”

“Hey! Hey!” I interrupted, laughing in spite of myself. “I’m pouring my heart out here, man, this is not the time—”

“This is _exactly_ the time, are you kidding me? If you were any more sexually repressed you’d be a Jane Austen character!” He slapped the back of my headrest enthusiastically.

Adam was caught by the full blast of my headlight beams on his way back to the car. His burning image concealed nothing: the purple under his eyes, the creased weariness on his face, the slump of his shoulders. The Adam that dropped into the passenger seat a moment later betrayed no such signs of tiredness. He rubbed his hands together, either against the chill in the air or in a feeble ape of excitement, and asked gamely, “Where to next?”

Equally tired and equally pretending not to be, I chose. “Home,” I said, longing for my musty bedroom, for some place I could feel safe and unobserved. You don’t have to feel like a warped, perverted thing, when no one else’s eyes are on you. In those few dark and unilluminated places, you can simply _be_.

“You’re going back to L.A.?” Smith asked in disbelief. “Like—tonight?”

“Tonight,” Adam confirmed robustly.

Smith made a thinking noise and settled comfortably into the backseat. “Great,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”

 

*

 

As we drove south, above the labored wheezing of my Caprice’s engine and Smith’s equally torturous snoring from the back, we listened to the latest reports on Matt Shepard.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: I have seen ten liars love, seen two lovers lie, seen youth, blinded, smiling. ...I have felt nothing at all.


	33. Chapter 33

As we drove south, above the labored wheezing of my Caprice’s engine and Smith’s equally torturous snoring from the back, we listened to the latest reports on Matt Shepard. Twenty-one years old, openly gay, beaten, tortured, and left for dead. They were calling it a lynching.

I monitored Adam’s reactions closely for any indication that he was monitoring _me_. But his horror and anger seemed organic, unmotivated. His lips and knuckles blistery white. I wondered who he was angry for.

It would be another six days before Matt Shepard died. We didn’t know yet it was a murder.

Matt gave me backwards courage. The raw brutality of what had been done to him matched the level of my greatest fear. What Davey had once dismissively termed paranoid ideas of persecution—thank god he’d never gone back to UC for a second semester of psych—were vindicated, legitimatized. I had known all my life that there was a poison in me—had learned through threats and bruises and the whisper of Davey at 15 what might happen if anyone found out. Matt Shepard proved—ultimately with his life—that I wasn’t wrong. That blameless young men were culled for my sickness.

Adam woke me from bloody dreams at dawn, murmuring gently, “Rise and shine.” In the grey morning light, half-lucid memories bobbed against the skin behind my eyes. I remembered dozing and waking with Adam’s hand warm on my cool shoulder, his thumb brushing a steady stroke along the place my vertebrae embossed the back of my neck. Blinking into the sunrise, I no longer knew whether I had dreamed this. Real or imagined, it had been a tender, restorative touch, somewhere between brother and lover. I had found strength there. My neck tingled gold with the almost-memory.

I woke my sleeping brother and we shambled inside. To his credit, Smith appeared totally unfazed by the conditions of the hovel we lived in. He walked into the living room and flopped fluidly onto the couch, facedown and snoring softly before I’d closed the door behind us. Adam caught my eyes from across the room, about to speak. I felt a nauseous pull, like a magnet dragging at my gut. Like his mouth was a black hole and if he opened it I’d fall in. Like I wanted to.

But Adam said nothing. Instead the silhouette of Davey appeared in the doorway, dressed in socks and boxer shorts with pillow-rumpled hair. “Adam? Jade?” His voice was frozen somewhere between relief and anger. There was always so much conflict in the absence of labels, so many cutting unknowns.

My nerves still jangled from the fear, from Dad, from Matt Shepard. “We’re back,” I said, and didn’t know how to properly explain where we’d been.

“I came home and your car was gone,” Davey said into the dark living room. The morning light was just beginning to bleed pale and grey through the curtains. He sounded young, younger even than he was, 23 and sock-footed and on the brink of everything, not knowing it. “I called everywhere—I couldn’t find either of you. No one knew where you’d gone.”

He glanced from me to Adam and back again, apparently not noticing Smith. I knew with great clarity that he was worried about expressing the wrong type of concern in front of Adam, worried he would give something away. Would 22 hours missing concern a platonic roommate? To what extent?

“My dad had a stroke.” I had slept for most of the drive up, but I was exhausted. Weariness broke over me in waves. Even as Davey exclaimed ‘oh my god’ and other noises of concern, I droned on, speaking over him with flat, interminable, near-catatonic exhaustion. “He’s okay. Or, he’ll be okay, probably. They don’t know how much functioning he’ll regain.” I took a breath and plodded on, fatigued beyond the point of feeling. “So we went to East Bay and saw him. And then we drove home.” A pause, and even Davey had nothing to fill it with. “Smith came with us. I think he’s gonna stay for a while. I am so tired, Dave.”

I ground to a halt, having expended every shred of language I possessed. My plea hung between us, trembling in the air.

Davey opened his mouth and closed it again. His face read equal parts bewildered and hurt. Adam broke the spider-silk tension, clapping a hand on Davey’s shoulder as he moved past. “Seems like a conversation for the morning,” he murmured on his way out, giving us a lead to follow.

Fractured beyond fixing, I walked past Davey in silence. I caught his hand in mine on the way, squeezing it before it slipped out of my grip and fell back to his side. I went silent to my own bed, and slept alone.

*

Davey never understood why I took Adam with me, when I hadn’t left him so much as a note. He couldn’t understand, either, the way I reacted to my dad’s stroke, the knife of responsibility embedded in my gut—as if I had willingly implanted it there and only through stubbornness refused to pull it out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: I've heard come through the walls a song I've heard many times.


	34. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, I am having trouble writing this, cats and kittens. I've gotten to point where it all just HURTS. But worry not! I will continue to champion the cause of Agonizing Javey Angst.
> 
> Don't own, am supposed to say it did not actually happen. I have thoughts about Davey and self-medication using other people's bodies, and I think that he sings about doing this and how he hates himself for doing it. There's a blog post in it somewhere. One of these days. Love you all!

Davey never understood why I took Adam with me, when I hadn’t left him so much as a note. He couldn’t understand, either, the way I reacted to my dad’s stroke, the knife of responsibility embedded in my gut—as if I had willingly implanted it there and only through stubbornness refused to pull it out. And we disagreed about the meaning of Matt Shepard’s murder. I thought it meant I was right. He thought it meant he had the duty to be who he was in public, without allowing fear of retribution or hatred to cow him.

We fought constantly for a while, never about what we really wanted to be saying. There was a cold war on. Just when we could have used an extra bed, Davey and I stopped sharing one. We practiced together with the furious intensity of pugilists, guitar strings vs. vocal cords, our shows flowing with passionate venom. All the sex we weren’t having burning up the stage.

The five of us were living out of a bus that barely held our equipment, plying SoCal for the Black Sails pre-tour. Five—Smith had stayed the night and kept on staying. He took over tour planning duties subtly but steadily, until on the night before we kicked off the tour I told him we could drop him off in San Francisco on our way through and he laughed in my face. 

“Where are you playing in San Fran?” he asked with facetious curiosity. “Where are you staying in Reno? What’s the name of the theater manager in Flagstaff, and what’s his favorite brand of champagne? Oh yeah—who’s driving your goddamn bus, if I’m getting off at Dad’s house? Who knows which lights Davey likes and which kind of eyeliner he needs if he doesn’t get those? Who’s got the contact information for your local openers? How about merch—who has the order numbers and where are you picking up your shipments? Have you thought about how the toilet paper on the bus is getting restocked, or where the bathroom tank gets emptied?”

I shoved him off the edge of my bed, where he’d been perched. “Fine, I get it,” I groaned, laughing. “You’re indispensable. We have lost the ability to function as a band without you inside of three weeks.”

In truth, I was glad he showed no inclination of returning to his old life. Davey and I had barely been speaking and he’d gotten custody of Adam in the split, who’d been tiptoeing around me with tight lips and a hangdog expression as if living in fear that I’d reach out in friendship. Consequently, I needed someone to spend time with when I wasn’t writing or working. Hunter and Smith and I dug out battered boards and took to the streets of LA and, later, stranger cities. We ate pavement and fell on our asses and scraped up our elbows, leaving blood stains on sidewalks all over the American West, generally behaving like we were kids again.

On tour, the silence started to become unbearable. Sometimes we’d catch ourselves working nicely together, talking and laughing during a sound check or both rooting for Adam during a scuffle on the bus. Davey was my best friend, maybe the only person in my adult life who really knew me. It was agony to live so near to him and yet without him. Our bunks on the bus were so close I could hear his every breath, his every adjustment of his blankets. It didn’t even make sense to me what our fight was about. Had I broken things off because of what my father had said? Had he done it, to punish me for bringing along Adam and not him? Had we fallen apart by simultaneous, wordless agreement? Without anyone saying anything, I couldn’t tell.

Then Davey started fucking other people on the bus. Not every night, not even every city—but _knowing_ I wasn’t the only person in his bed was extremely different from being inches and a thinly padded partition away from the actual act. And all its attendant vocalizations.

So I did something rash.

I called Magnus.

We hadn’t spoken in five years, since he kissed me and I vomited spectacularly. I had finished my sociology degree without ever showing up to another of his classes. My honors thesis had gone uncompleted, my graduate applications unsubmitted. Without apology or explanation, I had walked away from the life he’d offered me, for all that it had seemed we’d planned it together. I had not looked back.

What I was wondering about myself was whether I would do this a second time. Whether I was capable of abandonment in a serial fashion. Whether I was capable of anything different. How long could I live thirty cubic centimeters from Davey without saying a word? Could I—would I—do it forever?

I called his old number, mostly for something dramatic to do, a brash and self-destructive gesture to match the thrashing hurt within me. I expected that it would have been disconnected or that he’d have moved or that he’d have no recollection of me whatsoever. At the very most, I expected it would ring through to his answering machine and my courage could safely fail without our ever needing to speak.

Instead, he answered on the second ring. His low, accented voice filled the line like something melting and decadent, a flourless chocolate cake of a man. “Hello?” said Magnus richly, and I felt it all the way through my desperate, forcibly celibate body. 

“Uh, hi. You probably don’t remember—” I started, with a total absence of smoothness.

Magnus’ velvet voice cut me off. “Jade!” he cried warmly. “It cannot be!”

“It is.” I felt a smile spread across my face and felt the difference, between present warmth and sugar and ice, between undisguised friendliness and Davey, so inscrutable. “I’ve got a show coming up in Berkeley,” I said, “and I wondered if you’d like to come…”

Magnus took me to dinner after the show. I was fiery and alive with the thing that always found us on the stage. He looked a touch more grey, a touch more lined, and utterly beautiful. I was ravenous.

He fed me off his plate, laughed at every word I said, insisted on ordering dessert—“quite selfishly, I must confess; I am not ready for the night to end,” he said. He attended to me with his entire being. In return I flirted coquettishly, publically, without shame. Maybe it was my anger at Davey and maybe it was the high of the stage, but that night I didn’t care who saw me or what conclusions they drew. I felt like someone else. I felt _free_.

Magnus took my hand as we left the restaurant. He rubbed my knuckles absently with his thumb. We strolled the streets of Berkeley, all the landmarks of the place that I had for many years called home, the place I might have stayed had Davey not resurfaced in my life. We walked these streets hand-in-hand and my heart crouched on my tongue, throbbing panicked. I was terrified and exhilarated at once, unable to pinpoint the difference.

I pulled Magnus into the shadowed spandrels of the campus bell tower and we kissed. This time I was all in—I knew exactly what I wanted. I fell into his kiss like Alice into wonderland. His mouth yielded beneath mine and I was flooded with the taste of him, so different from Davey. I kissed deeper, as if I could lose myself there, pressing him up against the cold stone. I heard a moan escape me, my thumbs digging into his hips so he rocked them against mine. I wanted him, wanted him with ferocity, so that the world narrowed to his not-Davey taste and the movement of his hands on my chest, so that my whole body felt swollen and stung and fit to burst. My hands moved to his belt, clumsy in the November air. Magnus pulled back, breaking away with an urgent rasp of, “Wait!”

He pushed me away from him, bending forward over his knees as if winded. He waved off my frustrated efforts to attend him. His laughter was so incongruous with the scene that at first I thought he must be choking. “You are different than you were,” Magnus laughed breathlessly at me, shaking his head at the brick beneath his feet. “You have decided who you are.”

Possibly it was the way he had pushed me off him and begun laughing, but I couldn’t help but feel he was mocking me. “Just what I want,” I said roughly. The desire thundering through me gave way to anger so quickly, I wondered if it hadn’t been anger all along.  
“Do you only fuck drunk twenty-year-olds? Is that the problem?” I demanded, weighing my words for maximum sting. But though I had spent years being sharpened into a blade that could pierce Davey to his core, I had no idea how to hurt Magnus. He met my gaze steadily, sitting against the wall, his eyes sparkling with tears of mirth. He was a stranger.

“I’m HIV positive,” Magnus said kindly, the amusement lingering on his face a cruel contradiction of his words. In those days, HIV was a death sentence as sure as a bullet from a gun. It took longer to get there than traditional ballistics, but it was no less sure.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier,” he went on. His face grew more serious, pink lips twisting a faint frown. “It’s rather bracing as an icebreaker, I have found. Before the entrée always feels too soon; but it’s a grim pronouncement to accompany a meal. Sours the wine. And then dessert so often comes too late…”

“How long?” I asked, anger gone, leaving me utterly empty.

“Two years, now. I am afraid that after you I made even worse decisions, for a time. And now…” Magnus gestured to himself, standing at last. “If I may guess, this changes what you had in mind, does it not? There was a version of me that wanted nothing more than this,” he added wistfully. “But I think it is still not what you’re wanting.”

He took my hand from my side, cupping it in his two like a precious thing, and raised it to his lips. He kissed each cool knuckle slowly, with deliberateness and sorrow, as if treasuring each inch of my skin. “I would have loved you,” he told me. The look in his eyes burned me, but I could not look away. “I would have fucked you, drunk and twenty years old, and maybe that was wrong of me. But I would have built a life with you too. _That_ was what I wanted, Jade. Not to… to take advantage. I am glad you’re here, we’re here, so I could tell you that. That I am sorry for any harm I caused.” He tipped his head to one side, studying me. I cannot begin to guess what he saw upon my face.

“You didn’t—” I began to lie. I was surprised to hear the quaver I my voice that meant I was fighting tears.

“I did,” he said solemnly. “I wish I had seen it sooner. I would like to see them—the version of you and I who wanted the same things, who live in a house on a hill that the sun always shines upon, who are so happy and so in love.”

“The version of us,” I echoed. Because he was right. That was not he and I. I had come down sharply from the godhood of the show. I was cold and I felt lost. I wanted, more than anything, to lay my head on Davey’s chest and fall asleep, lulled to stillness by the sure, steady sound of his heartbeat.

“Don’t wait so long to call me again,” Magnus said brightly, letting go of my hand. “I am very glad to have seen you tonight. Now come on—I am freezing my _nüsse_ off. I’ll buy you a coffee. Anything you like, so long as it’s warm.”

*

I returned to the bus after seeing Magnus, cheeks raw from his stubble and heart still stuttering from the blow. Davey was bright and vibrant in the tiny shared living room, laughing with the ivory column of his throat exposed and clapping a hand on the knee of his equally titillated guest.


	35. Chapter 35

I returned to the bus after seeing Magnus, cheeks raw from his stubble and heart still stuttering from the blow. Davey was bright and vibrant in the tiny shared living area, laughing with the ivory column of his throat exposed and clapping a hand on the knee of his equally titillated guest. She looked nice enough, I suppose, with long knotty hair and sparkling studs in her coffee-colored nose and artful scarification swirled down her arms. His type, certainly. There was a glow in her eyes as they followed him, a feeling I had observed near as many times as I’d had myself. He was always enchanting.

I paused next to the couch, waited for their laughter to die out in the wake of an ashen-faced guitarist looming over them. “Enough of this,” I said simply, gesturing to her. It was not kind; she could not have known what she meant, what she was to me. “I’m finished. No more games.”

Davey’s face kindled into instant anger, his favorite thing to feel when the other things are too close, too hot, too real—too likely to swallow whole. “‘I’m finished’?” he quoted back, voice ugly. “What, you just get to decide now, what I do and who I spend time with?”

There was such bile in his voice, I could not hope to match it. So I didn’t try. “Yes. No. Just—not in the bus. Not while I’m here. I’m _asking_ ,” I added, watching his face contort again. “If we’re going to make it through. And even if we’re not. That’s what I’m asking you.”

The face he made was so black and twisted that I expected to overhear vigorous, acrobatic sex, his torturously familiar sighs and moans played up for show, all night long. I steeled myself to jerk off sadly to the sounds of him and, after, try to muffle my own crying in a pillow. Because it would be the end, I thought, if he would not change—if he would not do this one thing. I didn’t know how else, or what else, to ask. If he fucked her a foot from my head that night, I told myself, I would know we were truly broken.

But he didn’t. Not that night, and not any night after. And so we repaired it. Day by day, cautiously and then all at once, we began speaking. Smiling. Touching casually, as friends do, and then in a way less typical to friends. The tension in the bus broke open, and it was relief like the rupturing of a dam that replaced it. We gushed together again, our words and days and bodies. And if he cast suspicious glances between Adam and myself every now and again, I pretended not to see, just as he pretended not to mind when I recoiled from him at the slightest unexpected sound, lest we be caught together.

By the end of the tour, things were as they had been again. We did not speak about what had happened, or what we were and weren’t. We just picked up where we had left off—nothing answered, nothing resolved. I did not learn what I had done wrong or how to avoid doing it again. Being with him was a study in the art of pretending not to have any questions. Sometimes I wonder if I could have changed things, then—said something, even once. But mostly I think it would have made no difference. What I have done, I have done deliberately, albeit with great sorrow. And no one looks to me, looks for more sorrow. No one asks what I have to say, when Davey’s so loud.

*

So that was Black Sails. Fucking and pretending not to be. Music like golden fire flowing out of us and electrifying the airwaves. Hurting each other in a hundred casual unmeaning ways, and healing as easily. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: I’ll set the world on fire; and in its burning light; I will write my first love song; and I will feel warmth.


	36. Chapter 36

So that was Black Sails. Fucking and pretending not to be. Music like golden fire flowing out of us and electrifying the airwaves. Hurting each other in a hundred casual unmeaning ways, and healing as easily. Carving out the spaces not just of Davey and I, but of AFI, of the band we were growing into. Negotiating the people we would be and the rules of how we lived and worked together. And, when the album dropped, beyond our wildest dreams: success. It was like Hunter would say, later. AFI was a _real band_. AFI had made it.

And I loved him. Davey. Whether I could say it or not. God, I loved him like shipwreck. Like drowning. Like open wrists in a warm bath. He loved me, too, though I was slow to knowing it. In the lyrics of _Ever and a Day_ I heard myself, in the dark hallway, on our first night together, when I knew all was lost. With nothing left to lose. The night I knocked on his door and asked him to love me or destroy me, knowing even then it was both, could only be both. And in the lyrics of that song I heard what he was asking me, too. _Will you be my beloved._

As an answer and an ode and a promise, for his twenty-fourth birthday I gave him wings. We were touring on the date, in Chicago. I took him to a studio I’d heard good things about and sat there with him for eight hours, while a serious-faced young woman laid feathers into his skin with an endlessly buzzing needle. When we went for a second session, for the second wing, he reached up from where he laid face-down on a vinyl chair and took my hand. And even though there were people there, people who could be watching, I let him. Stroking my callused thumb down the paper-thin white skin of the back of his hand, I was struck by how fragile he was, how precious and fleeting the thing he was offering to me. And I didn’t care, then, who saw. I reveled in it, the freedom and the joy of holding the hand I wanted to, even with anyone in the world looking on. I knew then, if I did not know before, that I loved him. Every moment I was with him, every time I looked him in the face and saw the crinkles at the edges of his brown eyes, I fell in love with him over again. Every time.

I believed then that his wings were the thing that would set us both free. The symbolic unshackling that would paradoxically allow us to bind our lives together. This was true and this was not true. Our lives had been bound years ago, remember, over a skateboard injury, a torn-up knee. It’s in the blood.

After Davey’s wings, our stage show changed. Not imperceptibly but all at once. Always full of bravado and energy, Davey’s inherent charisma and sensuality formed a feedback loop, so that it flowed from the crowd into him and from him into me. He pressed his body against mine, slick with sweat and feverish with heat and straining with more energy than skin could contain. He sang at me, to me, for me. His voice sounded in my throat, his breath filled my lungs. His heartbeat, my heart. We danced together, he knelt before me, we hung off one another. Our eyeliner ran in the heat from our bodies, our fans’ bodies, the stage lights. Quietly and without fanfare we stopped seeing other people. Dates became fewer and fewer, til if they did not stop altogether they were limited to public appearances, award shows and receptions, events that demanded documentation. Photographs. As often as we could get away with it we showed up on one another’s arms. I stopped caring so much about what Hunter might think. Day by day by day, Davey’s hair grew long, first covering his ears, then brushing his chin, then resting on his shoulders.

For a few precious, miraculous years, we knew joy. We came together again and again, colliding on stage and off it, the thing between us leaping strong and vibrant and visible. Together we wrote an album of love songs, to and from each other, the band, our music, our fans. It was all one thing, knotted and pulsing. We touched openly and in secret, where all and none could see, cupped in the palm of the stage, burning and invisible. We loved one another.

And in this way, time passed.

*

But who wants to hear about happiness? Days passed like tumbling jewels, weeks like greedy glittering handfuls. Our music was our lives, and our lives were each other. But you don’t want to hear about that. I don’t—I don’t want to talk about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: It won’t be all right, despite what they say. Just watch the stars tonight as they disappear, disintegrate.


	37. Chapter 37

But who wants to hear about happiness? Days passed like tumbling jewels, weeks like greedy glittering handfuls. Our music was our lives, and our lives were each other. But you don’t want to hear about that. I don’t—I don’t want to talk about that. As with the sweet, stumbling, forgetting-gold of morphine, with happiness there is a point past good, where it becomes too much to bear. Where, unbearable, it becomes pain instead. Memories of love make a sharper knife than mistakes do. Than even the keenest regrets.

So let me tell you about some of the things I regret, instead.

Like a star in the moments before supernova, our fame doubled in on itself and expanded. Unexpectedly and explosively, we wrote a strange, thematic record for a new label, leaping from that comfort of knowing we’d never be seen and into success exceeding even _Art of Drowning_ daydreams. Suddenly, in a way we had never imagined, people’s eyes were on us. We were not only musicians anymore. We—or at least, he—had become celebrities.

He was heartbroken, the day we moved away from the Fox; he has this reputation as a diva, but I have never met anyone more comfortable in squalor, so long as the place is resplendent in its decay. We crawled in through a broken window and explored the place by flashlight. We lit candles on the old stage and reclined together on dusty velvet seats. We made love in the dancing shadows, among the age and dust and rotting glamor. After, he laid his head on my chest and sighed. There were tears sparkling like gemstones on his lashes. He held me like he was afraid I would slip through his fingers, like I might disintegrate out of his arms. “Tell me again why we can’t just buy the Fox and live here,” he said, a terrible sadness in his voice. He was nostalgic already, for the present. He was pining over sepia-toned memories of days we hadn’t left yet. Sometimes this was Davey, a creature so fragile and sad he was like origami. Other times it was not.

I kissed his forehead, the pearls of sweat cool on my lips. “What are you worried will happen?” I asked. I was used to soothing him. I knew the voice to use, the questions to ask, the questions to avoid. Sometimes I even knew the right words to say, the ones that led his misery back inside him. It wasn’t that I hated to see him with pain on his face, that I was repulsed by his sadness. It was his agony at the invisible rents in his heart and head; it was the hurt that I could not smooth out with my hands or lips. It was the misery that I could not participate in, could not heal, could not follow. Somewhere along the line I had shown myself to be an outsider, to be outside of his suffering; and he would not share it with me. I’m not sure which careless thing it was, that I did or said, that made Davey believe I would not or could not follow him down. It could have been anything. Maybe it was the way I reacted, when I found his razors. When he left his razors where I could find them, as a message, as a way of telling me something, and I read the message wrong.

So my role was to stay on the outside. To hold his aching form in my arms, to absorb the outpouring of misery I could not be privy to. It was to try and fold his pain back inside of him, where it was less visible, where it only bled out blackly in his lyrics, in the bitter laugh I sometimes heard, in the curling of his lips and flashing of his eyes when we fought. Eventually that pain would eat away all that was soft in him. Eventually he would stop smiling altogether, that dear, melting smile that wrinkled his eyes and freed his laugh. He could be such a sweet person. He was like an angel to me. That was what I was telling him, with the wings. That he was wrong about his cosmic patronage. That he was an angel. But Davey would continue to cast himself as Lucifer’s son, in his lyrics and in his heart. He would continue to think of himself as falling, fallen.

I wasn’t curing him. He thought—I think he thought—that I would be a kind of absolution. The love songs of _Art of Drowning_ had been so hopeful, in Davey’s maudlin way. But if you listen—listen, listen—listen close—beat by beat—you can hear when the heart stops. To me, _Sing the Sorrow_ was full of just that: sorrow. It was choking with it. It bled with the pain of having found true love, having found everything you ever wanted, and realizing it would not save you. Realizing that the pain and sickness, the thing like a murky black rot at your core, was still inside you. Would always be inside you. Realizing that even love was not enough. Realizing, maybe, that the black thing inside you would eat the love too. Would eventually tarnish everything. Would still be there, when all else had turned to dust. _I can remember when I first realized that dreams were the only place to see them_ , he wrote. It was his way of crying out for me to save him. _While I waited, I was wasting away. But you promised me._

I was only ever a man. No matter what I’d done. Even if I’d done the right things instead of their exact opposites. I couldn’t have saved him. It’s only now that I’ve started to wonder, what right had he to ask? I broke open and bled, thinking I had failed him. That he had asked so little and I hadn’t been enough. It’s only now I start to think, no one could have been enough. Maybe there was too much hurt and hunger inside him. Maybe it would have devoured anyone. And maybe I wasn’t spectacular or unique in my failure. _In the shadow of a star, in static pallor, I realize I never began_. Maybe there is never just one victim, one villain. Maybe of each there are two.

But he lay in my arms in the Fox theater before all that. _Sing the Sorrow_ was still just half-finished lyrics and experimental chords, before we moved to LA, before we left behind our derelict house and moved into a tiny, modern apartment together, just me and Davey and sparkling chrome appliances. He lay in my arms in the Fox theater and wept silently, because he was being eaten alive from the inside by suffering I could not reach or understand, but only cover up again. It was like writing in the sand: trying to outrace the encroaching tide, which wipes away your work before it’s even half-finished. Every time you think you’re almost there another wave comes, erasing, and you’re forced to go back to the start, frantic and gritty with sand and surf. This an impossible task. Davey an impossible task.

“What are you worried will happen?” I asked him, and I did not sound weary then. I had not yet grown pale and tired and empty, from pouring so much into him.

“What if you’re not you and I’m not me?” he asked in an aching whisper. “What if we leave behind the things that make us who we are? Nitro, and the house, and all four of us living together. What if the new stuff we’re writing is too different? What if we lose ourselves? Fade into obscurity?”

From his forehead, I kissed his damp eyelids, his arched nose, his proud chin, his round cheeks. “To me those sound like separate concerns,” I told him. “I’m more worried what will happen if people _like_ the new record. The vagaries of fame and all that. You’ll turn to a rock-and-roll lifestyle of women and drugs; Hunter will start a reggae side project; Adam will totally lose himself, you’ll see, he’ll start wearing bling and demand his own trailer, bigger than anyone else’s, and refuse to take the stage unless he’s guaranteed at least sixteen minutes of drum solo each show.” As intended, this made Davey laugh, a small laugh still half full of tears. I could feel the lines of his face compressing into a smile, his skin against mine. I smiled against his cheek, breathed into his delicate ear, his hair tucked behind it, a tiny broken heart hidden below the lobe. “Personally I _hope_ we fade into obscurity. We’ll be playing basement shows and substages at Warped when we’re 70, in plaid shorts and those little hats—those golfing hats—and tattoo sleeves. And you’ll croak into the microphone and our three fans, these the few punks who made it to old age, with their DIY walkers and floppy old mohawks, they’ll sing along in raspy voices to _Cruise Control_ , they’ll still know every word—”

His laugh was fuller now, more sure. I buried his hurt in handfuls of sand and hoped it would not fester. “And where will you be? Playing _Cruise Control_ with arthritic hands? Wearing suspenders, with a combover and these stupid sideburns all in silver-grey?”

“I will be beside you,” I swore to him. “Wherever you go.”

His lips interrupted any further foolish vows I might be inclined to make. He kissed me with the fever of a drowning man, clinging to life. I caved to these kisses, as I always did. The gnawing fire and terror of his sinking depths stirred a twin flame within me, as hot and as frightening, though mine might better be described as fear of life than fear of death. We did not waste any more of that night on speaking. We made love until we were both exhausted and raw, smiling in a stupid, sated way, me with a stitch in my side and he with bruised knees, both of us with puffy bee-stung swollen lips. We slept that night in the Fox theater, curled together naked on the stage, in a bed of old moth-eaten curtains. And Davey did not worry again—did not worry aloud, to me, I should say—that obscurity should be our undoing. That we would lose ourselves. That trading in our East Bay label for the city lights was a mistake.

* _  
_

I’m not trying to make excuses, but imagine, for a moment, that you’re me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may have sort of abandoned this story, but I have not abandoned you. This story, diligently researched and often painfully written, has been a project of mine for over a year now. The end of my labor is still not in sight. But I am picking up the threads again and resuming the tapestry, or at least trying to. Thank you all for bearing with me. Now that we are a homeless fandom, it feels especially important to finish this piece. Besides, I kind of having a thing about finishing pieces. This is a chapter I had written months ago and left limp and unpolished in a notebook. I hope to have some new material for you in the next month. I hope to spend this summer writing. Until then, dear hearts, enjoy. And thank you, stormstaticsleep, for not taking any of my shit.
> 
> Next: They told us love could save, so we prepared our graves.


	38. Chapter 38

I’m not trying to make excuses, but imagine, for a moment, that you’re me. Imagine what it was like, the itching, intoxicating edge of success, when we got picked up by Dreamworks and started writing for our new album, our big break, our one shot with a major label. For kids who grew up playing shows with sidewalk-scraped knees in the smoggy basements of punk houses, for kids who wore nail polish and eye liner and band t-shirts to school and to shows and got beat up for it, for kids who grew up angry and screaming into the ears of the similarly disenfranchised, powerless youth who were interested in listening—90s punk kids, with no real movement and nothing to protest, that heady, godly strength of feeling _betrayed_ , feeling _oppressed_ , without any real suffering of oppression—the thought of people knowing the words of our songs, of hearing us on the radio, that was huge to us. Even after the successes of _Black Sails_ and the meteoric _Art of Drowning_ , we were still pinching ourselves, waiting to wake up. We were living our wildest dreams and fame and fortune and making it in the music industry. Signing with Dreamworks was major league. There was an electric buzz tied to writing that album. It felt like we could do anything. Like we could change the world.

Got that? Feel it fluttering excited under your skin, scared but unbelievably alive? Okay. So imagine going into our first writing session. It was an event, not a private happening between Davey and I; the whole band gathered for it, the official groundbreaking of what felt like our most important album yet. Imagine what it was like being me, this gawky 26-year-old dork with a guitar who was almost a rock star. Imagine what it was like, standing in Adam’s dining room—our practice space—and meeting Davey’s eyes, gleaming brown, his excitement at the words he’d brought shining like a secret in his smile.

And then think of the words he brought.

Imagine finding out that way. Finding out that your lover felt alone, disappointed, unheard. Finding out that you had failed, you were not enough after all, that you had given him your all and he still felt empty. _There are no flowers_ , Davey’s scribbles said, his shining eyes. He sang them out in a tentative melody, those words of his. You can hear, in those songs, how broken he really is. There is nothing oblique or veiled in that album, not really. Davey sang, “Like water flowing into lungs, I’m flowing through these days.” He sang, “It won’t be all right, despite what they say.” He sang, “I never, never wanted this. From the start I’d been deceived. While I waited, I was wasting away.” He looked into my eyes smiling and he sang, “Poison hearts will never change.”

I’m a self-identified unreliable narrator. I realize this. But imagine what it _felt_ like. Because I truly hadn’t known. Hadn’t seen it. I had thought we were _happy_. Writing that album, I heard what Davey really felt. I heard what he thought of himself, what he thought of our relationship, what he thought of me. I could never tell which lines were just poetry and which were meant for me, so I went ahead and felt them all. And if my eyes clouded with tears and my throat stung with ragged fire, well, my fingers did not stumble on the strings and my voice did not break on my “whoa”s, so who was to say I felt anything at all? I didn’t tell him that it hurt me. I wasn’t—I’m not as loud as Davey is. That doesn’t mean I didn’t _feel_ it.

We wrote an amazing album together. But I learned something else, in the writing of it. I learned that the best I had to offer Davey was not good enough. That he still felt alone and unhappy. That he was drowning in it, and that even in our best moments, moments when I was full and happy and wanted for nothing, he looked at me and saw—pretty midnight eyes shining vacancy.

Yes. Yes. Of _course_ it hurt me. It was the keenest I have ever felt. Even in the wake of everything after, that first time I heard the words he’d been writing while I grinned like an idiot and enjoyed the best days of my life—that pain has never been matched. Maybe some critical foundation crumbled away at that moment, ensuring that nothing solid or stable or real could ever be built upon me. Or maybe I had been lacking that foundation from the start, and that was where the desolation reflected in Davey’s lyrics came from. I don’t know. I won’t know. I’m not trying to make excuses.

It’s just—I didn’t forget. I couldn’t. You don’t leave pain like that behind.

*****

If I was the fanatic, end-of-life devotion of _Silver and Cold_ , if I was the joy and fervor in the horrid romance of _Dancing Through Sunday_ , I do not for a second doubt that I was also the titular _Great Disappointment_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am negligent and I am bad and I am trying, trying, trying to write this story, and I am just not doing it. Your patience and support are greatly appreciated. I swear I'm not abandoned you.
> 
> Next: I’d share a smile but I’m too weak, I’d share with you could I only speak, just how much this hurts me. Just how much you…


	39. Chapter 39

If I was the fanatic, end-of-life devotion of _Silver and Cold_ , if I was the joy and fervor in the horrid romance of _Dancing Through Sunday_ , I do not for a second doubt that I was also the titular _Great Disappointment_.

When _Sing the Sorrow_ dropped in 2003, Davey and I had been together—and since we did not discuss it, since we did not adopt official titles, by _together_ I mean sleeping together regularly and clinging to one another on stage and off, largely exclusive and keeping up appearances at a sharply declining rate, sharing a bed and a sink and a mirror and a life—more or less since I joined the band. So that was four or five years, of being more-or-less exclusive, more-or-less official. Members of a more-or-less successful band.

Then _Sing the Sorrow_ dropped. Overnight, it felt like, we were celebrities. Eyes were on us in a way that they hadn’t been, before. We moved from a tightknit core of dedicated fans, ones who’d been with us from the start or seen us at shows, who had brought _Art of Drowning_ to second and third presses, who had called in and requested _Days of the Phoenix_ so many times it became a KROQ radio staple, to catching the attention of mainstream music listeners in a major way. Suddenly people knew our faces—not from our shows, but from music videos, from appearances on MTV. From magazines and photographs. We had a fan club, a website. We had producers, PR reps, a major record label scheduling appearances for us. We had been a successful self-producing punk band for a while, now. But fame was new territory.

I reacted… badly. The blindly light of flashbulbs sent me skittering, roachlike, back into the shadows. The careful cultivating of unimpeachable appearances, on top of our suddenly exploding schedule and touring frenzy, was time-consuming. It meant I had to let other things go.

I didn’t consciously decide for time with Davey to be one of the things I let go. I loved him. I can say that, now, when no one’s listening, when it’s too late to matter. But I did. If you ask me now, I’ll tell you I wouldn’t have chosen to give up a moment with him. But I did.

The Fuse launch party for the _Girl’s Not Grey_ video was a night of shining triumph for us, as a band. It was our first single from STS and it was an instant chart-topper. The video was the first large-scale music video in our history as a band, and the cuts we’d seen from editing looked better than we’d imagined. Davey was buzzing with energy, so that his skin glittered and shone as if effervescent, so that he gave off light. He was so beautiful then—soft and sweet, as if the world had never hurt him. He was like something that belonged in the night sky, gleaming and unearthly in its loveliness, its light. This is different, almost opposite, of the way he is beautiful now.

The idea of going to that party on Davey’s arm was thrilling, chilling, terrifying. The idea of going without a smiling girl to wedge between us, the idea that someone might take a picture that captured our secret, stole a careless touch or a telling look—it horrified me. So I brought a date, a shield, something with which to ward off the whispers I could already hear in my head. This is a terrible way to treat a person. It’s the symptom of a terrible way to treat someone you love.

She wore a long silver dress with an open back, lovely as anything. She touched my shoulder, tipped back her head while she laughed. It was hard to keep my eyes on her. They kept slipping off as soon as I refocused them, sliding around the crowded room to rest again and again on Davey. Dark eyes and dramatic eyeliner, sharp waves of his straightened hair framing his long-jawed face, silver rings and tight black pants and his nervous habit of biting his lip ring. _His_ laugh, always at least half-surprised, lighting up the room and its listener. He flitted around the party like a luminescent moth, charming every group he talked to. Everyone’s eyes were on him, and especially mine.

That whole night, I watched him electrify the room, bubbling with success and charm, and I ached to be beside him. I longed to cross the room and affix myself to his side, to pin myself to him and show the world that he was mine, he had chosen me, that stunning smile was just for me. Drunk on the pull of him, dazzled by the atmosphere of celebration and success, I did not for a moment sense the storm that was coming.

I shot Dave a come-hither look and slipped out the back door, telling my date with a laugh that all the fame and fortune was getting to my head and I needed some air. I waited in the alley behind the studio just long enough for goosebumps to travel the full span of my torso. I was visually cataloguing the content of the dumpster when the door banged open and Dave stepped scowling into the moonlight.

I was on him in an instant, caging his body in the scaffold of my limbs. He stepped away from my embrace, pressed his back to the peeling door, looked up at me through thick lashes with his breath catching in his throat, like I was a threat and he was afraid. “You look so beautiful,” I said, taking half a step nearer and then back again. My hands rose and fell, wanting to cup his face but repelled by the palpable barrier of his fear. “David Bowie-level otherworldly.”

But the flattery rolled off him, his face changing into a razor-edged mask, a sneer of cruelty and haughtiness he wore when he wanted to obscure reddening eyes and a crushed frown, as if someone had ground his pretty lips under their boot. “Can’t you see how this hurts me?” he hissed. Words hurled like sharper things.

“What have I done?” I regret, now, the impatience in my voice, then. But I heard the lyrics in his words—and lyrics, especially, stung.

“ _Her_ ,” spat Davey, throwing up a hand in his frustration at having to name it. His other hand rested on his hip, elbow jutting out to a vicious point. “You bring _her_ here, to this party that’s meant to be for _us_ , you leave me to drift around Hunter and Adam’s heels like some kind of sad puppy, you parade around the party with her shining beside you and smile so prettily for pictures, and you ask me what you’ve done? Everywhere I go I am _haunted_ by her, by the two of you together!”

“But I haven’t brought Priya to anything before.” My confusion real, as if it were Priya herself that Davey objected to and not what Priya stood for.

Davey had begun to pace, now, whirling in a tight furious knot in front of the door. Three steps out, three steps back. “No one else feels the need to bring dates! Everyone else is content to just celebrate our accomplishments together, as a band. If it was because you _cared_ about her—” Davey’s voice hitched on his despair, at that thought—“that would be one thing. If the two of you were so fucking in love you couldn’t bear to be parted. But you don’t even seem to know their names half the time, J. You don’t know anything about them and you don’t find out. You just—you just nuzzle the curve of their necks and smile prettily for the camera, and then you come out here and try to put your hands on me and I am telling you, _I cannot bear it_.” He took a shuddering breath, stilled his frenzied pacing all at once, quivered terribly an inch from my chest, stared up at me with glass stars in his eyes. “If it’s me you want to touch, why bring her? Why bring any of the hers?”

It was like he was speaking a different language. I stared back dumb and uncomprehending. How could he not see that I brought dates because I _had_ to? That glittering silver-skinned women were our shield? That they protected us? I brought dates _so that_ we could be together, _because_ we wanted to be together. How could he not see it?

“So that I _can_ touch you,” I told him. “If neither of us was ever seen with anyone else, what would people start to think? What would they say? There are eyes on us, Davey! We agreed—we’ve always agreed—”

“Why are you so concerned about what everyone else thinks?” Davey’s words came out a howl. He knotted his fingers in his hair, grinding the heels of his hands into his forehead.

“If they were to find out—they can’t. We agreed!” The panic boiling in my gut was too large and terrible to name. I imagined, as I had been imagining for years, our pictures in the paper. A steamy embrace, lips locked, hands traveling to undeniably nonplatonic places. My father, my little sister, my little brother. Everyone we had gone to high school with. The disgust on their faces, the black curses on their lips. What they’d say about me, what would be _true_ about me. Like a live, scrabbling beast, the fear sour and surging in my veins. The animal urge to escape, to gnaw off my own foot if that’s what it took to get away.

“What are you afraid of?” Davey sounding desperate to understand, his face crumpling up, near to tears. “I can never tell anymore! One minute you’re so afraid this isn’t real, the next you’re afraid it is! I can’t keep swallowing your fears! I can’t keep on absorbing your panic forever—it’s _poison_!”

He stepped to me, where I stood gasping, fighting for air against the thing strangling-large in my chest, horrible choking sobs tearing at my throat. He pressed his forehead against my shoulder, his hands skating up and down my arms, not knowing where to land that they could press the wounds shut again. “What are you so afraid will happen? Tell me, tell me,” he whispered. The fight had left his voice so quickly, deflating, the space it left quickly filled by pain. With light touches and soft words he tried to soothe me, while panic stole my breath and squeezed my heart and locked my limbs with its slick terror.

“I love you, baby, I love you.” And, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” And, “Please, let’s just go back inside. I’m just—it’s just hard, to see you with someone else. I get jealous. I know you’re doing it for us.” He had, has, the remarkable ability to spin webs of words he didn’t mean, words he wanted to mean. He could wrap the sting up in silk so neither of us ever felt it. He took the poison in, to draw it out of me. He apologized for and disappeared that which we should have fought about, should have suffered and endured and then moved beyond. Instead he apologized for feeling it and took the sting away, bandaged me in his embrace. He soothed my fear so that I didn’t have to.

Of course it cost him. The price was steep, the debt mounting until its chasm was so large he could not fill it, not with all of himself. He took from me, yes, but I took from him too. Neither of us gave enough to the other. The fights blazed terror into our hides, so that sick and shuddering we fled from them. I wrapped my arms around him, sunk into his obscuring apologies, let him pull the fight out of the air and undo it. And then we both went back inside, I to my date and he to bump along palely at Adam’s side, as if it never had been.

Of course there was a cost. Of course there was fallout.

With Davey, there are always consequences.

*****

If you were still somehow under the impression that I am the hero of this moment, trustworthy and deserving of the opportunity to explain myself, let me take a moment to caution you that I am not. You shouldn’t take my word for anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: Heartbreak incarnate, I'm nothing if not your memories


	40. Chapter 40

If you were still somehow under the impression that I am the hero of this moment, trustworthy and deserving of the opportunity to explain myself, let me take a moment to caution you that I am not. At some point, Davey must have decided we could not go on as we always had: him brave, colossally certain, endlessly patient while I battered myself senseless against him, trying to smother in his flesh my bellowing fear. I did not see this coming. In my own way, full of alternating panic and denial as I was, I was quite sure of us. Of him, of what we were together, if not of me. I looked at what we had and thought, _this is working_. The things I did—the ways I hurt him then—they were to _protect_ us. Up until the day I left him I’d have sworn they were necessary measures—unpleasant sacrifices I made for the sake of defending that space where we were together.

But Davey, I think, would tell it differently.

As I’ve already mentioned, the internet frightened me. It was filled with fanart, fanfiction, querulous inquiries about Davey’s sexuality. I should not have responded to these allegations, I know now. But like I said. Then, it felt necessary. So I became Jade Puget, Hetero Defender, aggressive debunker of myths about Davey’s sexual proclivities. Historically, I had always made angry off-the-record comments to interviewers who broached the topics of eyeliner and vinyl pants; I had always worn this grimace, an almost imperceptible tightening of the jaw whenever a fresh wave of rumor surfaced. I had lied, stridently and vehemently, to the faces of journalists and fans and family and friends, about how one hundred percent straight we all were. The word “crusade” is not, I think, too strong to be applied to my efforts.

It’s unclear to me, now, who I was trying to fool. And why I thought that those were effective tactics, anyway. I was the guitarist who doth protested too much. It was all… very transparent. I see that now.

Davey weathered it—my panic, my denial, my outright lies. He weathered the cutting contradiction I trapped myself in, the strangling juxtaposition between revulsion and horror at what we did and the tumbling together into bed, night after night, enjoying those things I swore I would never enjoy. By daylight, I would loudly, angrily, swear on my life that Davey would never be so _perverse_. And then, by night, I would lure him to perversion.

This hurt us both. I’m not sure who it hurt more.

I remember the day Davey discovered my first message board post about it. He was hunched over his laptop, frowning, a few locks of hair escaping his chopsticks and falling in his face. I had posted it almost a month ago, long enough ago—and with cursory diligence—that I didn’t realize what he was frowning about. He leaned back, sighing. Hunter set down his book and bent around Davey’s shoulder to peer at his screen. I maintained total concentration as I painted my nails, as if I wasn’t listening in, as if the volume in my headphones was loud enough to cover their voices.

“I’m guessing you hadn’t seen this one yet?” Hunter asked neutrally. A safe bet, given that Davey’s face had crumpled up quicker than when you presented him with dairy. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Davey shake his head mutely. I imagine my typed words stung like fresh cuts. I imagine his throat was tight and burning. I imagine he was close to tears. I imagine a hundred thousand ways to punish myself. I imagine, for just one fraction of a second, that it’s not all too late. This hurts more than any other fantasy.

“Why is it so important to everyone whether I’m straight?” Davey asked thickly. What he was really asking was _why is it so important to Jade_. Steady and quiet at his side, Hunter nudged Davey’s shoulder with his own. “It’s not like I’m trying to hide anything. I mean…” Davey gestured to himself helplessly. His glitter-polished bitten fingernails, that long hair in its messy knot, his silver heart-shaped necklace, the smudges of yesterday’s eyeliner beneath neatly plucked brows. His gesture also encompassed the evidence not in attendance: the way he wrapped himself in pleather and fishnets and cosmetics, the way he openly, lovingly, hung all over me both on stage and off, spelling with his body the truth we’d—I’d—spent years concealing. Davey wasn’t pretending anymore. Maybe Davey hadn’t ever been pretending.

Not going public with our relationship was one thing. But the feverish hiding, the bald-faced lying—he had never agreed to that. Only an insane person would have agreed to that. A look of suffocation passed over his dear face. Davey recognized the feeling and named it in a whisper, glancing surreptitiously at me. “It’s like he’s _ashamed_ of me.”

What else could he assume?

To his credit, unlike me, Hunter did not dismiss Davey’s feelings or attempt to placate him. He slung an arm around Davey’s shoulder instead, a casual, fearless, restorative touch, and gave a light squeeze. “If you want me to kick his ass,” he offered at normal volume, not giving a fuck whether I heard or not, the tiny downward crease at the corner of his lips his only tell, “just say the word.” Hunter believed I was behaving badly, and he wanted me to know it. He had never approved of the way I treated Davey.

Davey laughed, my favorite shining sound, grateful. Hunter tended to say the right thing, tended to express loyalty and friendship and camaraderie with small, understated gestures, like bringing vegan muffins to practice or nonjudgmentally offering to kick my ass. The thing that strikes me about Hunter is how _naturally_ it comes to him, being himself and being with other people at once. He is able to accept himself so completely that it’s no extra effort to attend to others, to give to others. He has an instinct for the right thing to say. I am not sure I have ever heard him apologize. I am not sure he’s ever needed to.

“If I thought that would make any difference,” Davey said, his voice warm and laughing again as if these newest words didn’t hurt me the most, “I’d take you up on that offer.”

This is the manner in which I learned, day after day and song after song, how much pain I caused him. How loathsome I must be. This is the manner in which I began to ask myself, _how could you hurt someone like this, if you really loved him?_ This is the way I first learned to answer, _maybe you don’t. Maybe you aren’t capable._

*****

The way you see us in interviews and magazines, it’s Davey who has the words, verbal and accessible, and me who sits there silent and unknown. But in real life it was different.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: Who would run from us? Who would run for cover?


	41. Chapter 41

The way you see us in interviews and magazines, it’s Davey who has the words, verbal and accessible, and me who sits there silent and unknown. But in real life it was different. Davey was always half-mystery, half-hurricane. His moods changed faster than I could react to. Maybe because I was too wrapped up in myself, I could never predict how I would affect him. Things that made him laugh affectionately and swat my shoulder on Tuesday would send him to our room sobbing on Wednesday and screaming on Thursday. My terror and hurt and confusion, all the ways I was an asshole and did the wrong thing, my shriveled shaking heart: I wore these things on my sleeve. But Davey was inscrutable.

And, more, he was _changeable_. He mastered himself, perfected his poise, years ago—back in high school. He had perfect control. He never showed anything he didn’t intend to. He could be heartbroken inside but smiling merrily up at me. He could be bleeding inside his shirtsleeve but composed with haughty, untouchable pride across the table, telling me he was fine. What I mean is, even if I did manage to figure him out, to pin him down, he might decide he was tired of suffering five minutes later and remake himself into something different. I was always a step behind; no sooner did I get my footing than the rules changed and I was falling again. This was a great and terrible skill. You already know I don’t have it. Whatever else I might be—coward, bastard, monster, even—I have been that thing consistently. Jade Puget can be depended upon to be cowardly. To be monstrous to the people he loves. With me, there are very few surprises.

There was screaming, over my ongoing message board _crusade_. Crying and raging and begging and apologizing and fucking like drowning men, like it was the first and last time at once, and making up. And maybe it would have been over, if I hadn’t kept _doing_ it—kept publicly defending Davey as a paragon of heterosexuality, as if to be anything else was to be deficient and loathly and despised. Kept bringing girls to parties and shows. Aggressively maintained the artifice. The more hurt he screamed in songs, the more pain and recriminations I heard in our lyrics, the more we battered our bodies together onstage, the more desperately I loved him, the more tightly I clung to the lie that I did not.

As I’ve said, Davey believes in consequences.

It hit me exactly where he intended it to. The pictures, I mean. His goal must have been to make mefeel what he did, since attempts to tell and show me had failed. And maybe if I didn’t obsessively monitor the status of our band’s internet presence, trying to get out in front of the bombshell I felt was inevitable, I wouldn’t have seen them at all.

Those pictures of Davey and that girl. Laughing, kissing, horizontal in a bed. They were not an accident. The first time I saw them was like getting hit by a train. Every jealous thought I’d ever had, every nick of hurt, every doubt—they exploded on impact. I wanted to vomit, to cry, to hit something.

And, in my wisdom, instead of thinking to myself, _Well Jade, that’s how Davey probably feels_ , I thought to myself, _This is not even remotely the same._ Because, remember, me bringing dates and debunking internet rumors was a _necessity_. What Davey had done was much more akin to a betrayal. Maybe it was the intention that made it so. I didn’t doubt for a moment that those photographs were an act of retribution.

I knew—I thought I knew—that he wasn’t really sleeping with anyone else, anymore. Because of the thing between us, so beautiful and suffocating bright and alive— _love_. But we never talked about it, because I was terrified he’d make me say aloud what he was to me. He would ask, I would refuse, we would fight. We learned to avoid such conversations.

As a result, things like those photos and whatever acts they included—I had no grounds upon which to claim betrayal. I just had sick twisting feelings crawling like bile up my throat. I should have gone to him. I should have said _I get it now_. I should have said _cease fire_. I should have indicated in any way whatsoever that he had succeeded in hurting me; that I cared for him and wanted him to be just mine; that he could stop twisting the knife, because I felt it. Maybe the cold war would have ended, if I had just said it. Just said: _Stop it. You’re hurting me. I love you._

Maybe, perhaps, if only. None of it means anything now.

*****  

We toured for over a year. We lived on the road. Life was stage lights and crowd highs and collapsing together, sweaty and ragged, spending our godhood in each other’s mortal flesh, and then the slow return to reality.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: One at a time, I'm lost in little deaths.


	42. Chapter 42

We toured for over a year. We lived on the road. Life was stage lights and crowd highs and collapsing together, sweaty and ragged, spending our godhood in each other’s mortal flesh, and then the slow return to reality. Touring was always the best time for us. There was so much chaos and energy and fatigue, so much forced closeness between all four of us, that there was virtually nothing to fight about. If we could have lived out of a tour bus together forever, driving around the country, maybe Davey would still love me. But there I go again: maybe, maybe, maybe. _Fuck_ maybe. Listen: here’s how it was.

Touring was golden. On tour we were free.

After a year of touring, we were ragged-voiced nomads, grinning but exhausted in a state of perpetual post-show decadence. We lived on watery coffee and the nourishment of our fans. Like vampires, we crept cautious and squinting out of our tour bus to explore strange new cities in scattered handfuls of afternoons. Everywhere we went, we could count on being recognized by at least some few citizens. The streets held no anonymity. Still, there were always secluded corners, places where no one’s gaze lingered on Davey’s telltale locks or tattooed arms. I grew comfortable within this restless life, within the circle of his arms. And so we’d link hands, sometimes, in sprawled-out cities. We’d hide behind big sunglasses and play at being tourists, snapping photos together fit for a family album. We’d exchange quick kisses in restaurant booths. I would lay my head in his lap on the green expanse of a well-watered public park and close my eyes, thinking of nothing but the sun on my face.

Then the pain started. One day during warm-up, Davey shrieked and collapsed, hand tearing at his throat like he could pull the thorn out of it. He hunched on the floor backstage like a wounded animal, eyes bright with terror. Had he whimpered in his sleep more than usual, the past few weeks? Had his perpetually hoarse voice failed to heal, even with half a week off between shows? I hadn’t noticed. I couldn’t say.

That first time, he took hot tea and wound a scarf around his throat and was on stage two hours later, screaming with relish and enthusiasm. So we thought nothing of it, until it happened again.

Another stage, another city: the first doctor of many to tell him he had to stop singing. So began our drowning days and sinking nights. He laid shaking in my arms, tears pooling on my chest, begging _leave me, leave me_. I swore I never would.

(It was seven months after that that I left him.)

It felt like we would lose everything. Dave got on stage and sang night after night, pale, strained face the only evidence he was hurting. All the doctors in all the cities said the same things: stop singing. Finally, after he refused a script for painkillers in Detroit, the latest doctor sat him down and told him, “If you don’t let yourself heal, you will be causing permanent damage. If you ever want to sing again, you need to stop performing every night, and you need to stop immediately.”

Davey bit his lip, cast a helpless glance in my direction, and asked, “For how long?”

The doctor just looked at him, one greying eyebrow raised.

“He asked a question,” I heard myself say, voice uncharacteristically brutal. The doctor started, as if he’d forgotten I was there. Angry, I stilled the urge to reach out and take Davey’s hand.

“Months,” the doctor said coolly. “At least. Maybe a year.”

I could tell from the sharp-edged shutting-down look on Davey’s face that he was steeling himself to sail out of this office like he hadn’t hear a word of it, like he’d never been affected by anything in his life. I imagined that this is what he had done every other time; that’s why, this time, I was here. I sat up in my chair and angled my body to block his view of the door. I asked, “So what can we do?”

Detecting that I was the only person in the room who could be reasoned with, the doctor addressed his response directly to me. “He needs to stop singing right away. He should minimize speaking for the next few weeks—nothing louder than a whisper, and that used sparingly. He’ll need anti-inflammatories if nothing else. As for the healing, all we can do is monitor it. If the swelling around the cysts goes down, we may be able to remove them without damaging the vocal cords.”

“And then he could sing again,” I prompted. Davey’s face was like a stone, unreadable. The barely perceptible trembling of his hands, balled into fists in his lap, was his only tell.

Apparently oblivious to the damage he was doing with his words, the doctor said, “Maybe. It depends how much tissue damage he’s already caused. It depends how big the cysts have gotten—how much his insistence on singing has exacerbated things. It depends how successful the surgery is, how well it heals. It depends,” and the doc shot Davey a stern look, “on whether he _listens_ to any of this. Every day he keeps talking and singing and performing, the damage gets worse. The chances of singing fully and normally again— _ever_ again—get smaller. This is not something that can be outrun. Rock and roll is not everything, gentlemen.”

My own face showed all the fear and pain that Davey’s did not. There was a part of me, maybe, that was worried about the future of the band—about my career. But what I felt, what I was aware of feeling, was what it would be like for Davey to lose this. To lose this most important part of himself, of who he had always been: born screaming and yet to stop. _Rock and roll_. As if it had ever been about fame—as if it had ever been about anything but Davey and the music.

I did take his hand, then. At another time this gesture would have meant the world to him; at this moment his face didn’t flicker. Some part of him broke, that day. We did not have to name it to know. Things would be different, now that I had heard the news. He would be forced off the stage before he could immolate. I would be the villain, the loathly spokesman for his health and well-being. I would tell Hunter and Adam. I would insist. I would end the tour, and I would break the band.

Because I loved him.

Everything, because I loved him.

*****

After we cancelled the last leg of the tour, I took Davey to Italy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The most negligent author ever wishes you all a merry Christmas! I am glad not to be doing this alone. You are still, after all these years, the best readers a girl could ask for.
> 
> Next: The gold in my palm was mistaken for sand.


	43. Chapter 43

After we cancelled the last leg of the tour, I took Davey to Italy. I did this cunningly: I pretended we were flying back to LA right up until the moment I handed him his boarding pass in the TSA line. Cysts be damned, he shrieked with excitement and surprise when he read, and recognized, the airport code: FCO, the Fiumicino International Airport in Rome. He threw his arms around me and buried his face in my neck; when he let go his eyes shone with tears, and I could pretend the whole light was still in them, that this was the Davey of my youth, that no part of him had ever been extinguished. Happy tears. It has been so long since I have seen anyone’s eyes fill with happy tears.

Everyone in the security line stared at us, vibrant tattoos and make-up and high-contrast hair, embracing and laughing, drawing eyes of the curious, the bored, the overly judgmental. The potentially recognizing—magazine covers matched to jet-lagged faces. I was surprised by how little I cared. I tipped my head towards his, kissing his forehead, smelling his hair, letting the world stare. For a precious moment, it was nothing to me. He was mine, and no one could be luckier. Who gave a damn what anyone else might think?

“I wasn’t ready to go home,” I told him, a simpler version of the whole truth. He took my hand and held it, and I was glad to let him.

The whole truth was this: I didn’t want to go home in failure, in defeat. I didn’t want to end out tour on a scary ,threatening, possibly life-and-band-changing note. And I wasn’t ready to give up what we had found on the road: the comfort, the easiness of being together. My own bravery, found only in strange cities. The absence of appearances. The lack of necessity to hide or lie. On tour there was no need to explain why we were always together. On tour there was no one asking.

I _wanted_ , I _didn’t want_ , and I thought that this was reason enough. At that time and in that place, I accepted myself as reason enough.

Well. We’re all fools, when it suits us.

I didn’t want to return home to Davey’s depression, sure to be one of the blackest yet, leaving him a brittle veneer of the man I loved, leaving me behind when he slipped down and I couldn’t follow. I didn’t want to return to the specter of my own cowardice, to our tired fights, to tears and screaming at a man medically forbidden to scream back. To _hurting_ each other.

I didn’t want to go home to hurting each other, and I couldn’t imagine our home any other way.

Perhaps you begin to see the problem.

Italy was a fairy tale—like ten days out of someone else’s life. Our fan base in Italy was quite small at that time, the prevalence of swooning tourists and men with long dark hair quite high. I was without self-restraint, without hesitation, without self-loathing. I felt safe for the first and perhaps only time in my shuddering life. For his part, Davey was much quieter than usual. He spoke sparingly, in whispers. There was space for us both, in the silence he left, and mostly we were just together, companionable, speaking little and touching often. We ate incredible food and were laid low by the breathtaking beauty all around us: the countryside, the architecture, the history. Italy was palpably ancient and amazingly decadent. Everything played out on a grand, romantic scale. It was like being wrapped up in silk: every sense softened by luxury.

And with each wonderful day we spent there, Venice, Sicily, Rome, the larger the knot of dread within me grew. We had never been so happy, so aligned with one another in thought and action. So simply and easily in love. Do you see yet? Why this was unbearable? Each day brought us closer to going home, to returning to our real lives, our real _selves_. Living out who and how we could be made who we really were unbearable. Ten perfect days did not give me hope; they damned us. In our real lives, I knew we could never be like this, never be so good for each other, never really be happy.

Did Davey feel the same terrible, spreading dread? The sense of doom for our future? Or did he just feel relief? Even joy, that I had apparently changed so utterly? Maybe to him, rather than the final nail in a splintery coffin, those ten days were the clouds parting and the sun streaming down, a dove with an olive branch, a sign that we could finally go home and be happy. That our misery had coolly, crystally ceased, like slipping into the sea, a separation from suffering. That we would have peace at last.

Maybe that’s why he did it.

We were eating lunch in the Milan airport, pleasurably weary on the last day of a flawless trip, when Davey asked me to marry him.

I told you he would, eventually, give me another opportunity to say no. To turn away from him. I told you only a coward and a fool would have taken it. Have I said enough for you to know, yet, what I am? What I really am?

In a whisper, so soft and unlike himself, Davey said, “Singing and you, Jade, have been the most important things in my entire life—the things that have defined me and made up who I am. The things I have fallen in love with, again and again, with each year, each day, each moment. I don’t want to—I can’t lose both. I want to be like this, with you, forever. Swear you’ll be mine always and I will vow to never love you less than I do this moment—to love you more, to belong to you without hesitation, to hold back no part of myself, every day for the rest of our lives. Marry me, Jade. Be my beloved.”

Do I need to say it—again? Don’t you already know? Can’t you hear, by now, what I said—what I have always said—the only sound my lips can form?

There was, there _is_ , nothing I have ever wanted more than a life like those ten days in Italy. The full richness of what Davey and I had, the clarity and the divinity, the unabashed _glory_ of what we could have been, finally realized: this is the only dream I have ever dreamt.

And in spite of that. Because of that, even. Loving him, needing him, nothing without him, when Davey asked me to marry him, what I said was “No.”

*****

Actually, precisely, what I said was, “Don’t ask me this, Davey. Please don’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys I saw Blaqk Audio last night and OH MY GOD. You can read about/watch some highlights here: https://inthewhispers.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/material/
> 
> The short version is that I think there is a happy ending. For the first time since Burials, I think there is a happy ending. I hope to write much more regularly for you all soon. Grad school is finished. I can be a person again. And oh my god, Material--our happy Davey, our happy Javey ending, is BACK. Rumblings of an album, a tour next year... I absolutely cannot wait.
> 
> All of my love to our small, dear fandom, as ever.
> 
> Next: I promised you a heart you promised to keep.


	44. Chapter 44

Actually, precisely, what I said was, “Don’t ask me this, Davey. Please don’t.”

As quickly as it had appeared, the softness, the _him_ ness in his eyes was gone. I was left looking at the version of him I had left on U.S. soil, the version of him who had just been told he might never sing again, the version to whom I enforced the doctor’s orders. The version whose heart I had already broken, so many times.

In retrospect, it’s incredible that he would even ask me. That Davey would look into my eyes in 2004 and bare enough of himself, even then, to ask me to share his life wholly. Davey had been building walls against the damage I wrought for years already. The necessary fortifications a lifetime in the making. Our love a cataclysm. An earthquake, a landslide. And I the fault line.

It was never a fairy tale. We were never.

So the beloved light in his eyes flickered and diminished, halved yet again by my calculated carelessness, my deliberate disregard. I had a glimpse of his hollow self, of the Davey who stared up from the bleakest pit of despair, before the space filled with quick-swelling anger. Doctor’s orders didn’t matter, then. Startled Italians and Americans also waiting in the airport didn’t matter then. His voice was rough and strained and _loud_ as he demanded, “Why shouldn’t I?”

“You know I can’t,” I said, helpless to stop words I couldn’t quite believe I was saying. Not that I didn’t mean them. Just, I never thought he’d ask me to say them out loud. “I thought you understood.” It wasn’t coming out right: a feeling, a sense of being, that I could not explain in words. _I thought you saw me as I really was, tangled up in myself and helpless for you, the biggest coward that ever lived, and loved me anyway._ Ever I have been helpless, hopeless, at expressing myself in _words_. The words have ever been Davey’s, the music mine. Even had I the words, how could I say them? Even my tongue was not quite forked enough to spin a marriage proposal into proof that he did not really love me.

Yet it _felt_ like just such a trap. Like he had never really seen me. My gut sucked endlessly down, like my entrails were caught in quicksand.

“That is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever heard,” Davey said flatly, loudly, furiously. He was as perfectly dangerous as I had ever seen him. He quivered, poised on the edge of something unspeakable. I had no idea what he would do or say next. What either of us would.

There are some things that you can’t take back. Words you can’t unsay. Wounds that you can’t stop pulling open, because you can’t imagine who you’d be if you let them heal. If you weren’t constantly torn up and bleeding.

“What is it about me?” he asked, voice rising horribly, face collapsing in along the sharpest lines til it was a mask of agony, til he was an Edvard Munch painting. I can still see that moment, if I close my eyes: his unwashed, slightly tangled hair pulled back into a sloppy bun at the nape of his neck, the lines around his eyes showing misery and weariness instead of their usual mirth. Freckles on lightly sunburned cheeks, from the day he had forgotten his umbrella. The broken hearts just showing under his ears. The worried way he chewed at his lip ring while he waited for the next blow to fall.

I wish I could picture him smiling half so well.

“What is it about me that you find so repellent? So detestable? Why shouldn’t we belong to each other? Why shouldn’t people know? Who cares who’s watching you with me? Let them see!” The questions a flood and I a drowning man.

“We didn’t invent being gay, you know—we didn’t fucking _invent_ this. I’m just asking you to be brave! For nothing else to change. Be brave and be happy with me! But that’s too much for you, isn’t it. I’m always too much for you.” A decent man would have interjected, defended himself, defended Davey. But when I opened my mouth the water rushed in. I choked upon it.

“So I wonder: is the thought of someone, _anyone_ , knowing you’re with me the worst thing you can think of? Do you love me so little? Am I such a nightmare, Jade, that you would rather lose me than be seen with me?” He was yelling now, yelling loud enough that I imagined I could hear his scar tissue tearing, could hear his vocal cords ripping under the pressure of the devouring cysts. _You did this,_ I reminded myself quietly. _Cut it into your heart so you do not forget. If he never sings again, this is why. You are why._

Did I mean to take everything from him, before I finally let it end?

“Are those the stakes?” I asked, and hated myself for the calmness in my voice, where his was so ragged, so overpowering loud. I sounded like someone who didn’t care at all.

I acted accordingly.

“I mean, is this an ultimatum?” I felt frantic, desperate for oxygen as I went under, but my voice was smooth as the bay on a still day. Calm as the eye of a storm. The hurricane of Davey all around me. My life in disarray. “Are those the options? Either I consent to marry you, or—or what? You’re out of my life?”

For a moment he was speechless. It was as if I’d hit him. It is an ugly thing, calling someone’s bluff during a yelling fight in an airport.

We should have ended things then. We should have broken up all at once, even if it cost us the band. God, I wish we’d ended it.

Davey’s head dropped into his hands. His shoulders screwed up into knots next to his ears, and I knew he was trying every trick he had not to cry. I knew behind his hands his face would be crumpled and creased, his tongue tangy with blood between his teeth. His voice was small, pinched, and ever so precise as he replied, “Of course not. The last thing I’m trying to do is lose you.”

I sat down beside him, though it would have been kinder not to. I stroked his hair, leaned my head against his shoulder, tried to undo what I had done. Tried to pull the poison back into me, as if I weren’t corrosive on contact. “We’ll figure it out,” I lied bitterly, not even believing it then, as the words left my lips. “We’ll figure something out. I don’t want to lose you, either.”

But I did.

*****  

We ended bit by bit, after that. Losing each other an inch at a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: Flash flash car crash, we’re no fixtures


	45. Chapter 45

We ended bit by bit, after that. Losing each other an inch at a time. Each fight a little less reparable, each new wound a little too deep. Each fuck more mournful and desperate, til we both wept after, each of us pretending not to hear the other. Dave cried in the shower more days than not. I pressed my face into my pillow and let the salt stream out, as if in soggy cotton I could drown. Eventually, we ran out of skin to scar.

During this time, we began writing Decemberunderground. Fights and accusations and heartbreak encased in those lyrics like amber, and worse yet, flecks of love frozen within it—the last fetid traces of our great hope, crystallized for all to see. A flaw in the face of such coldness—such winter. It was hard, to stand there stupidly with my guitar and pretend I did not feel Hunter and Adam’s eyes on me. To pretend I did not know what he was singing about, empty-hearted save for sorrow. Every mouthful a mourning chord. I stood and swayed beside him, playing funeral dirges like penance. We all felt it. I could not breathe.

The Decemberunderground was the ice and velvet armor he built around himself, freezing his heart so he could survive me. Davey began to explore new depths of cruelty. I yielded up my body, a canvas on which to test new claws. It was the least I could do. I still thought, maybe, that I could bleed it out of me. That black, spreading center. The man I really was, in shadow, in my secret heart. The monster. Wide enough cuts did not exist, to excise that beast. Metaphorical or otherwise.

I don’t quite know the story of how we broke up, the last time. There were so many. So many last fights and last fucks. He’d storm out of my life forever, taking all of his things, and I wouldn’t know if it was really over or if he’d be back the next day, miserable and fractured, breaking himself open on me all over again. We existed in a blistering, liminal space, unable to be together or stay apart. Even when, nominally, we were broken up, the dread magnetism still pulled us horribly into each other’s arms. Our bodies remembered the motions even with the pleasure gone, even with only bile left in our hearts. We’d split for hours, days, or weeks. Then, weeping, we’d come back together. Hours, days, or weeks would pass, and then we’d split gain.

How do you leave the love of your life when his voice, his livelihood, everything he’s ever lived for is damaged, perhaps beyond repair? How do you break up with the only man you’ve ever loved a week before surgeons open his throat and try to salvage what they can? How do you crawl into his hospital bed and fumble your way into his backless paper gown, fuck him senseless and sneak out once he’s finally sleeping, leaving behind a wilted bouquet and the knowledge that you won’t call?

I have done these things. I can’t tell you how I did them, or why. I think I was trying to annihilate myself. To bludgeon to pieces the part of me that couldn’t live without him. I did not know how to let go gently, without obliteration. I didn’t know how to love him without damaging him, how to leave without cutting him out of myself. Maybe I thought that eventually, finally, it would be too much—he would leave _me_ , he would refuse to take me back. Maybe I knew I could never control myself. That he would only be safe from me if he was the one saying no, the one deciding not to come back.

We still fucked, long beyond the point we could be salvaged.

I moved out while he was in the hospital. While he was recovering. I did not tell him this. We had been fighting, before his surgery, and the fear of the future held us together more than anything. Most nights I slept at Adam’s or made the long drive out to Smith’s. Our apartment began to feel like someone else’s home. I spent about one night there out of every seven; maybe two, before I’d say something horrible, fail in my character, disappoint in some new way—incredible to think that I could still find new ways to disappoint, incredible that Davey could still find it in himself to be surprised and disappointed—and he’d say, again, that this wasn’t working, that it would be better if I left. And I would leave. Until I came back.

This doomed orbit might have gone on forever. (And hasn’t it? In a way?) But Davey was anesthetized, Davey went under; and while his influence was muted, briefly dulled, I found the strength to load my things into a moving van. Hunter arranged for me to move into the spare bedroom of one of his friend’s. He did not have to voice his disapproval. We both knew, without it being said, that I hadn’t yet told Davey.

I brought him home from the hospital. I was his 24-hour nurse. I did not sleep or eat or bathe, without first tending to his needs, without making sure he would be safe and comfortable for the time it would take. As if this could atone for my larger unspoken sin. At night, we slept curled like commas, as we had so long ago. I stroked his hair while he slept, stared with wonderment at the beauty of him. At the impossibility of that fragile, perfect flesh, smooth as a seashell, containing so much. So many mysteries, so much suffering, more tragedy than one man had any right to.

I hovered like a confused vulture, monitoring his recovery. When I judged him to be sufficiently recovered, sufficiently healed, I would leave him. I held this plan in my heart. I would nurse him back to health, and then I would break his heart. I would finally, fatally, leave.

This was the plan, at least. I do not have the best track record, with plans.

The first afternoon he was up and out of bed, he was curled like a cat in an armchair, looking out onto rainy, grey LA. I brought him a tray of tea and vegan biscuits, to begin easing him back onto solid food, and decided that he looked strong enough to survive the loss of me.

He smiled up at me, and in a whisper, thanked me for the tea.

I’m not the one who’s good with words. I said, “You’re looking better.” I said, “You know I love you, more than anything.” I felt oniony tears sting at the edges of my eyes. I said, “But I have to go.”

He had been bedridden, had not noticed that the bureau was empty of my clothes, the medicine cabinet half-bare, my hair products and flat iron vanished. So at first he didn’t know what I meant.

“You can call me, if you need me. I will always come.” I didn’t know how to explain myself, make sense for either of us why I had to do this. We loved each other, and we could not be happy. Davey was ant-trap poison and my love held only pain.

We were so far gone that he didn’t even look confused. He took my meaning quickly and without grace. “You mean you aren’t coming back, this time.” He said it like a challenge, or maybe like mockery. Like we both already knew what I liar I was.

“I don’t know. I want to stay. I want to go. This is… we are… I _have_ to go. I can’t be what you want. I love you, Davey.”

His hair hung lank, his skin sallow from being tube-fed while his throat healed. His eyes glittered black with purest loathing. I could not explain myself. For all this time, I have been trying, failing, to explain myself. What could I say, in a moment, that would capture any of it?

“If that was true, you’d stay. We’d make this work. Even if it’s scary and difficult. Love is work, Jade. Stay, and prove it’s true.” He said it like he hated me, like he never wanted to see me again.

“If I loved you, I’d stay away.” I laughed, although none of this was funny. I was so helpless. “I need to stop hurting you. I need to… not do this anymore. All we are anymore is knives. I’m tired of cutting you up. You know I have to go.”

Davey, plainly, did not know. He stared at me with betrayal on his face. “I don’t know anything about you, anymore,” he said. His voice—since the surgery, he did not quite sound like himself. Was that the worst part? It was a conversation composed entirely of worst parts. He didn’t sound like himself and it felt like that was something I had taken, too. As if, if I could have loved him better, he never would have gotten sick. As if it was my rotten love festering inside him that grew into those terrible cysts. That made him scream so long and so hard in the first place.

“Run away, then, coward,” he spat. Fists up, ready to defend himself by cutting my throat, if that’s what it took to stop the blows from falling. “That’s what you’re good at. Run away.”

“Hiding is different than running,” I said. Quiet, miserable, sharp. Of all I could have argued, could have contested, that is what I chose. Yet again I can’t say why. “I have _never_ run from you.” The silence weighed, speaking more clearly than I could: _you’re the one who ran away._ All those years ago, his dark hair streaming out behind him. I stumbled through the brush and chaparral, fingertips numb and lips burning, and he ran from me, weeping. Oh, I was a coward and I was a monster. I am, I am. But I could not in that moment tolerate the accusation that I had ever _run_.

“I lied, and I hid, and I never wanted this— _us_ —in any spotlights. But not even you get to fucking say that I’m the runner. As if I’d ever had the strength to move away from you!” I was laughing again. Because that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? If I had any sense at all, I would have run and never looked back, and I’d have done it years ago. Instead my feet were rooted at ground zero, so that when the hurricane hit, I’d be the first body broken and swept away. “You’ve seen my belly but never my back,” I was saying, barely making sense, distracted by the pain of tearing my own heart in half. “That’s the point of this entire fucking car crash, Davey. That I can’t get away. No matter how I long to.”

The words coming out wrong. Sour. His face caving around them, getting sharper. Cruelty congealing in those awful, lovely corners. Of course I longed to get away. Because I loved him to the point of losing myself, of destroying us both. But it came out of my mouth sounding less like love than loathing.

“Let me make it easy for you, then,” he said. His false voice—his whole self—deadly. “We’ll say it was all meaningless. That it was just an echo, when you sang my song. That our whole life together is shed and worthless. Let me show you, Jade, how to use me and walk away. Since that’s my supposed skillset.” He stood abruptly, and I had the mercy to pretend I did not see him wobble. I had the mercy to let him be strong in his fury and disgust, while I wept in shame, in silence.

He marched to the door of our apartment and flung it wide. I bobbed along in his wake, a perverse blend of helpless and relieved, almost even happy. “Davey,” I said, irreparably crossing the threshold, stepping out of what was no longer our home and into the hallway.

“Don’t ever speak my name again,” said Davey. He slammed the door on what had been our lives.

*****

The next time I saw him, he was unrecognizable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am writing a decade out, right now--writing my version of 2006--and it is still so painful. It's getting easier. I see hope again, don't you? If you want to read a beautiful and enchanting version of a very similar 2006 Javey, check out ObjectLesson's Standing, Still. That should keep you busy while I'm slow about updating, and what are you doing with your life if you haven't read it anyway?
> 
> For all my writing on gay angst and pain and misery, it's important for us to seek out queer spaces and queer stories that show us happiness, too--at least in fiction, a counterweight to the terrorism and daily violence and erasure that has been epitomized by the loss of life in Orlando, by the murders committed in Orlando. Apologize to no one for who you are, even if you're that person only quietly, invisibly, internetly. You're part of our community too and we deserve gay stories that make us smile. Books I've read lately that are queer and happy too: Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi (black disabled queer lady spaceship mechanic with a happy ending????), Planetfall by Emma Newman (this book isn't exactly happy, but it's incredible and about space and mental illness and the queer characters go through personal suffering but *not for being queer*), Carry On by Rainbow Rowell (basically Harry Potter fanfic, very light and funny and full of joy), and Janet Mock's memoir Redefining Realness (deals with trauma, abuse, the politics of growing up trans, but is full of hope and light and the potential for great happiness). Take care of yourselves, all. Don't just read my depressing-ass fic! Thinking of you and glad you're here with me.
> 
> Next: Begin the poisoning.


	46. Chapter 46

The next time I saw him, he was unrecognizable.

A few months had passed. Impossibly, I had stayed away. As long as I was not in the same physical space as he was, I was finding, I could control myself. I could mostly control myself. I had surrendered my car keys and cell phone to Smith on more than one occasion. Staying apart, giving Davey’s throat and all the rest of him (and all the rest of me) time to heal—I meant it. I didn’t want us to hurt each other anymore, didn’t want us to hurt anymore, period. There were darknesses in Davey I could not rescue him from. In my time away from him, I began to recognize, slowly, that I had been ill-used as a balm for that darkness. I was not something to be troweled into lifelong wounds. I was a poor astringent, more like powdered glass than a salve. Shining and soft to the touch, but I could only shred him inside. I could heal nothing. He had asked more of me than I could have possibly given. This is not to say I forgave myself for failing him so badly, just that I had begun to perceive the outline, the edges, of my failings; I had begun to recognize the task itself as impossible. I began to understand (as I could not, would not, even begin to forgive) how it was that I had failed.

This is what time apart had given me. I don’t know if I thought I would be stronger, that we could come together better than before, if we were both permitted to heal; I don’t remember what I visualized, when I thought of the story’s ending. The person I was then, that penitent optimist, has long since been obliterated. He and I are separated by a gulf of suffering. I will not be him again.

What had Davey gained, those last few months? For one, he had healed enough to sing again. If not quite as himself. His voice did not have the full range he was accustomed to, had a sound slightly more in-check, more distant, more artificial, than the rawness of a kid screaming from a basement stage into a crowd of fifteen; this was jarring for all of us. We did not know, then, if he would continue to heal, or if this was the voice of the band from now on. It was still beautiful: he had been sending out MP3s, lyrics and melodies, more polished versions of what we’d been writing for DU, so we could each work on our parts and have most of the work finished before we ever met, face-to-face, in a recording studio. When I heard his voice unfurling from my speakers, the first time I’d heard him sing since our tour so abruptly ended in 2004, I wept. It was still beautiful.

But the healing was not what stood out, when I saw him that day. He had gotten to the studio before me; he was outlining goals for the day on a dry erase board, as he always liked to do, when I walked down the stairs and tripped, froze, died, of not-quite recognizing him.

He had cut his hair, which for a decade had been my dearest treasure, the long falls of which used to curl from his sweat, starting with the inner layer; it would trail across my chest when we laid in bed, and his every movement would release the smell of his shampoo, his mousse. Without knowing, I had tied up my memories in it, buried private intimacies in its blue-black lushness. God, I loved that hair. I loved to wrap my hands in it, to nuzzle my face in it, to stroke it in soft lines down his back. I loved the motion of it, the way it whipped and swirled and tangled on stage, an extension of his influence, his affect. I loved how you could pick him out from a crowd, those long dark locks that framed the long V of his jaw, that turned his lovely full face to the shape of a heart when it rounded into a smile… The hair of Lydia Maitland and Mia Wallace, the hair that he would twirl absently around his fingers or tuck haphazardly into chopsticks, the way strands of it would inevitably escape to frame his face. Watching him brush it in the mornings, sometimes I would remember its awkward growing-out phase, when it curved chin-length like a Brady Bunch bob, when it was shorter still and he shoved a wet forelock out of his eyes on stage, sweat flying, mascara running. On more than one occasion I’d dyed it for him, working chemical goo in from root to tip, massaging it out again in the sink, the length of his hair filling the sink basin like a living creature in its own right, rinsing and lathering and rinsing again until, at last, inky water ran clear. Helping him untangle it from his lip ring on an especially windy day, laughing and laughing as he grew ever more irate. Davey’s hair held so many years of knowing him, watching him, loving him. With it cut so suddenly, abruptly away, I barely knew him.

It fell, now, in an angle across his face, as if to emphasize the sharpness of him; the rest was clipped short, close to his head. His eyelids were shadowed in smoky, glittering grey up to the eyebrow, his lashes dark and long. All of this made it hard to see his eyes. From behind the angle, he could look down at me with easy scorn. I could feel him measuring my reaction. I wished I hadn’t started so visibly, at the sight of it, at the sight of the _absence_. He looked smaller and larger at once. Certainly more self-contained, less knowable. A smirk from behind the new, flat-ironed forelock; he had seen enough, on my face, to know he’d hit his mark. He was satisfied.

I was so wrong-footed that day in the studio I could not lose myself in the music. I was writing every day, lately, filling up the space I usually filled with Davey with my keyboard, my computer, laying down track after mindless, upbeat track, creating a bright enough candy-coated sheen that something I needed to express, something more dark and clawing and animal, could seep out too. Could escape, just below the level of everyone’s polite smiles. It was grief and it was loss and it was anger. Yet I could not sink into music, into any part of the process I had devoted my life to, in the studio that day. I could barely feel my numb, clumsy fingers on the strings of my own guitar. My tongue swelled to three times the size of my mouth when we laid down backing vocals, when Davey made eye contact from behind that hair and watched me choke on the words of our duet. My voice was lower, fuller, with the presence of near-tears. Of course that track is the one he liked best, the one that made the album. I bit my tongue, dug my nails into my palms, squeezed my eyes shut. The vision of him burning in any darkness. There was no escape from the hell I’d created. I had been wrong. No one had learned anything in our time apart. There had been no healing.

I sang:

_Calm down, come down, cold resides with me_

_I flee, too_

_As you exhale_

_And sink into_

_And I grow pale_

_Without you_

He replied:

_I flee to_

_Decemberunderground_

_I breathe in_

_The water underground_

_Without you_

This was only the beginning, you understand. His hair was the first thing to go, but it would not be the last. It was not enough that _I_ had lost Davey, my Davey—he would be stripped from the world, struck from the record. Undone as if he never existed at all. Davey set himself to the task of tearing everything I’d ever loved about him out of his skin. He built up a glitter-dusted, carefully cosmetic, utterly camp persona in his own place, playing chicken with the cameras, as if venting everything I’d accused him of being or fretted would come to pass if we kept hanging off of each other on stage. He _became_ these anxieties, and he threw them in my face. _Look at me, wearing false eyelashes, with a manicure, in pink pants, with Jeffree Star. Am I still straight, Jade? What do the messageboards say?_ _Who will defend my virginal, hetero honor? What are they saying about us now, Jade? Who cares who’s watching?_

Listen to me. Crazed, pained ramblings of a paranoid man. A man reeling from the hurt done to himself. But this is what it felt like. It did not feel like a new look, like Davey’s reinvention. It felt like flagellation. Like punishment. Like something I deserved.

At the end of the day’s recording, we were grumpy and exhausted and exhilarated. We had done good work, but there were obviously many weeks of work still ahead. Hunter and Adam had grins that seemed satisfied and genuine. Davey looked like crystal: glittering, but always in danger of shattering. I don’t know what my own face showed. Too much: Adam asked me privately, while Davey and Hunter were packing up, whether I wanted to join the group for dinner. “I’d understand if you don’t,” he said significantly.

I did not know what anyone had heard, what anyone had been saying about me. I thought they would both be grateful, if worried about the future of the band, to know I had no intention of hurting Davey any worse. That day, for the first time, I wondered if he was done with hurting me. Now that I’d posed the question—without my permission, my eyes cut across the room, landing on his new corners, the new exoskeletal strength and scorn rolling off his shoulders—I didn’t think he was. And, too, I realized that Davey had known them both longer. If this was to be a contentious split, there was no reason to think anyone would be on my side, or even _at_ my side.

Newly wary, I wondered if Adam might, like Davey, hate me. I could not stand smirks and side-eye and haircuts from the entire band. Not even if I did deserve it. If they all hated me, if they all wanted me out, I would save them all the goddamn misery of being around me and—

“You’re completely welcome, of course,” Adam said, so sincerely that all the racing, panicked thoughts in my head stilled utterly. His eyes were an anchor to mine, holding me to earth, holding me within a reasonable gravity. I had not properly appreciated Adam’s eyes before, I thought. They were terribly kind. Water in a desert, offered to a self-loathing heretic who, though he longs to suffer, cannot in desperation turn back from comfort, from life. Those were Adam’s eyes.

His hand fell just above my elbow. Did I imagine it, or did he squeeze? “God knows I haven’t spent enough time with you lately. But it seemed… rough today, and you should know. Dave’s got—”

But what Davey had did not need to be spoken, because at that moment she burst through the soundproof door and into the room, and in a rush of pretty warmth and cheer she had crossed the room to him. They embraced. The air smelled of— _she_ smelled of flowers.

“Dave’s got Brittany,” Adam finished. Too late.

For a moment, I knew what he had felt, all those times I had been accompanied by smokescreen women, vampires who showed up on camera but never in my bed. The sight of her in his arms landed in my gut like a great-axe, like my side had been split in two along the line of the spleen and everything I’d held inside, I dropped, slumping, spilling sideways, intestines and organs and bile and blood, sloshing out between these useless flaps I tried desperately to hold together, this empty skin, this empty self, this pale-faced nothing boy. It stole not just the breath of me, but the lungs.

This was like the pictures, the pictures of him lying shirtless and laughing, his kind crinkled eyes, his kissing mouth, turned onto someone else, left there in the open on the internet for me and anyone else to see. This was like the pictures, but writ large, in person, physical.

He turned his head, kissed her cheek, broken heart flashing behind his dear ear.

This was nothing like the pictures.

I didn’t go to dinner. I invited Adam home instead. He drank beer, because I felt that _someone_ needed a fucking drink, and we watched movies. I was careful to select ones Davey would have hated, uninspired, violent action that rode on adrenaline and explosions instead of plot. Adam sat next to me on Smith’s couch. We didn’t speak much; I am grateful he did not ask me to speak.

For a while, I held his hand.

He let me.

*****  

My heart was a sinkhole in my chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys are the best and I'm so glad you're here with me. I write to you from Mississippi, where I now inexplicably live.
> 
> Next: Let’s cut fast to the car crash where the future went down with the past


	47. Chapter 47

My heart was a sinkhole in my chest. Stumbling and raw, I needed a barricade between Davey and I—something, some _one_ , to force me to keep my word, this time. After that first day of recording, when Adam let me hold his hand—when he looked at me with even blue eyes, steady as his drumbeat always was, and said without saying, _I’d let you_ —when I almost did, just for the pleasure and destruction of it, the chance to bury my wickedness, my wretchedness, in someone else’s skin—I knew I was in danger, then. Whatever discretion I had not abandoned was seeping out my poorly stitched seams. If I was not careful, I would fly apart.

And then everyone would see.

I did what I knew how to do. I shored up. I sandbagged the appearance of respectability. I might as well say it: of heterosexuality. Of being anything, anyone, but what I was. I didn’t use Adam to sop up my wounds; I began dating a 19-year-old model, began for the first time in years appearing in public and in pictures with someone other than Davey at my side. He drew away, in the arms of his own paramour, and Marissa replaced his warmth. I liked her—wanted her, even. I came home from recording a man ablaze, trembling and barely contained. I needed to submerge myself in something. She was an ocean, intended to drown the sun.

I hoped, but did not believe, it would be enough: talking to her, taking her out, dancing with her, laughing, laying my hands on her, being touched in return—I poured myself, drowning, blind, grateful, into her. I wore the memory of her skin, her lips, like armor. Under her strength alone I was able to walk into the studio each morning, to face him across the room, to watch his eyelids flutter and his face contort while he sang, screamed, sweated, _hated me_ , into the mic, in front of our friends, for everyone. Each evening, my soul and spirit feeling rope-burned, rubbed raw, I poured myself back into her. In her sweet, cool grace, she contained and restored me.

For a time, perhaps, I thought she could repair me.

But love, like blood, never fully washes out.

Davey had been my confidant, my best friend, my _everything_ for close to a decade. He implicitly understood things about me that anyone else would have made me explain. He knew my opinion on everything, knew all my rituals and processes. He had lived and loved beside me for so long. There was no one who could replace that. Without Davey, I was terribly alone.

And that’s when I was safest. As long as I could stay away from him, I could stay away from him.

“I can’t keep leaving you forever,” he said into my neck, my mouth on his ear, his back pressed up against exposed brick in the narrow hallway of a bookstore down the street from the studio, where we had arranged to meet after recording, to negotiate terms of Blaqk Audio. We would not be writing in the way we used to, a tangle of limbs and guitar strings in Davey’s bed; this was understood. I had conditions to put forth, lyrical content I would not accept. I had thought I could control myself, in a public space, which is why I had insisted on meeting in one. Why I had even chanced it, going straight from the studio to being with him, _just_ him, weak and burned and alone, without first stopping off to see my touchstone, to hold Marissa’s cool, firm hand and squeeze stoicism from it. I thought my lifelong fear would hold me in check.

Hunger was stronger.

He had gone to the bathroom and without deciding to, I had followed. Outside the door, I had lurked waiting in that dim hallway, feeling predatory, loathsome. Then he emerged and I was springing upon him, pinning him back, pressing all my weakness onto his tongue. His hands fitting to my hips like they were sculpted there. His lip ring metallic in my mouth, colliding with my teeth. My hands in his hair, holding his face to mine, one side shorn and the other angular, tangling. Our foreheads pressed together, breathing hard, trembling with the restraint it took not to devour him there. Til he ducked his head, put his lips against my throat, speaking to my pulse. “It’s so hard to breathe, watching you leave me. I’m only one lung, only half a heartbeat. Physically, I cannot take much more.”

I dropped my hands, withdrew my tongue from his ear, half a moan escaping before I could tamp it down. I put my hands in my pockets, not knowing what else to do with them—since I could not allow them to exercise their will—and looked at my feet, letting my bangs hide my face, sinking into silence. “I can’t either,” I said. A rare moment of honesty.

“If you won’t stay, stay away.” Davey’s voice was hoarse with venomous loss, like I had pulled all the good out of him when I pulled away. “I am not elastic. Eventually, I am going to break.”

I bit my lip, ducked my head. I did my best to stay away.

 

* _  
_

 

“Dave, I want to talk about these lyrics.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys continue to be the best ever. I have so many IDEAS right now, so many things I am/want to be writing. I haven't felt this way in years. I am so, so glad grad school is over. I forgot what it was like, when 40% of my brain isn't consumed by stress and dread, when I'm not working 80 hours a week for no money and too burned out to even think the rest of the time. I'm writing queer fairy tales and two FOB fics and this story and I'm trying for like the fourth time to write the third installment of my Jadam pirate epic, and every other thought I have is about writing, and it's incredible. I've been putting myself in writing jail (desk, notebook, no electronics, nothing to look at or do but write) because otherwise I'm incredibly good at distracting myself. Anyway, I hope to have lots of things to share with you going forward, even as this story continues to be a slow and painful updater!
> 
> Next: So I’m feeling much worse now. You’re better, you’re better.


	48. Chapter 48

“Dave, I want to talk about these lyrics.”

There was a long silence on the line. Just when I thought the call had dropped, I heard him take a long breath.

“There are so many lines you could be objecting to right now, honestly, I don’t know which you mean,” he said at last, a laugh in his voice that did not make it any lighter.

“I’m not objecting,” I defended automatically.

“Okay, there are so many lines you could be _politely but without objection asking me to change_ that I don’t know which you mean.” We had had other conversations like this; I had asked him to change words, pronouns, sometimes take out entire verses. Sometimes he agreed and sometimes he did not. Somehow, it was the least adversarial part of our relationship at that time. We had spent years together doing exactly this, after all: tweaking songs, arguing about melodies and chord progressions and choruses, _creating_. These conversations, these arguments, were without heat. They were comfortable. They tended, even, to be fun.

This was not that kind of conversation.

“ _If you knew, would you save me?_ ” I quoted. “ _Would you save my life had the boy that you knew not died? I’m leaving without you in silence._ ”

“Are they not working in the melody?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. The things Davey made me feel sometimes felt just exactly like a splitting headache. With a phone between us, it was hard to tell whether he was being deliberately obtuse, if he was evading the question or truly didn’t hear what I was asking.

“Dave. I’m asking if you’re okay.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Come on, this is not a preposterous question! I send you a track, you send me a suicide note, _I’m gonna follow up_.”

“It’s _not_ a suicide note. God! Jade, it’s a song.”

“ _Can you tell me what stops the pain? How deep must we cut to reach sensation?_ ” I read flatly. “We had a fucking agreement, Dave, and I know it was a long time ago, but this feels an awful lot like you telling me that you’re not okay, so if you could just— _please_. Answer the goddamn question.”

“What about when I wrote _we’ve got nothing to hide and we’ve got less to lose? It’s a lot to take but they won’t find us, it’s a lot to fake but pay no mind_? When I wrote _this is how we’re made_?” Davey’s voice lost its half-play exasperation. It buzzed with real pain. Taken aback, I fumbled. I did not have a response.

“Where was my phone call then, Jade?” he pressed. There it was: anger. And under it, a wavering. I knew him well enough to know that was how he usually sounded when he was trying not to cry. But the cold, proud Davey I’d seen in the studio—the Davey who had retreated to the Decemberunderground to fortify his frozen defenses—he wouldn’t cry on the phone with me. He wouldn’t let himself be weak where I could see. More than that, I didn’t think he’d cry about _me_ at all. It must have been the connection that wavered, not his voice. “Why weren’t you calling me then and saying, ‘gee listen Dave, is this song about us, what are you trying to say here exactly?’”

“Dave.”

“No! I’m sorry, but fuck you! You don’t get to ask me that anymore, Jade! You don’t get to ask me fucking _anything_ anymore! I am not _yours_. You made that _perfectly clear._ ”

“Yet here I am, asking.” Always inverse, always just out of tune with one another, I was only able to find calm when he was on the brink of immolation.

“I am completely great, Jade,” he spat. “I feel totally fucking _fine_.”

“Okay. Fine. That’s all you had to say.”

A silence stretched again. I could practically hear him over there, fuming. I could still see the look on his face, all those years ago when I confronted him about the razor blades; the times in between when I confronted him about fresh scabs or old scars or newly-noticed burns; all the missteps and offense I’d given along the way. I’m sure he was making the same face now.

It is not always easy to love someone who is breaking themselves apart. Not that love should be easy all the time—not that it’s not worth suffering through—but the fights that danced around the edge of this territory, barely daring to touch it, they were not new to us. Our relationship was different, but my concern—and his irritation at my concern—were not.

“I do like the song,” I offered. It was a weak offering, but I had nothing else he would accept. “I just—”

“I know, you fucking worry,” he snapped. “Is that it? Can I go?”

“I would still save your life.” The words came out faster than I could stop them. I hadn’t even thought them; they just burst out of me. “In case the song was about me. If that was a lyric that you… wanted an answer for. I can never tell.”

“If you had the answer to war and starvation and human suffering, I wouldn’t want it.” The words were cruel, but his voice just sounded tired. “I don’t want _your_ answer for anything.”

“Dave—”

“Didn’t I fucking tell you, I don’t want to hear my name in your voice ever again?”

“Fine. Go. I won’t waste any more of your time.”

Maybe you’re wondering right now, why did I agree to do Blaqk Audio at all? Maybe you’d like to ask, why didn’t you just say no? After all, I didn’t _have_ to make an album. I didn’t have to put myself in his path like that, not when we were already so deep in Decemberunderground. I didn’t have to stay up at my computer hours after Marissa had fallen asleep in my bed, listening to Davey sing _please, please, please don’t take it easy on me; just make it, make it, make it harder to breathe_ over and over until I came into my own hand or started crying, whichever happened first.

Do you hate yourself so much, Jade? (The answer to that should be obvious.) Do you hate him so much? Why else would you say yes?

But I’ve never hated him. That’s the point. I said yes, and kept saying yes (all the times except the time that counted), and will keep saying yes—because I love him.

I have always loved him.

When I checked my email the next morning, Davey had sent me a new audio file. It was him singing what would eventually become _Wake Up, Open The Door, and Escape To The Sea_. Over breakfast, Marissa eating cereal across the table from me, I hit play. I choked as the song opened, _Please catch me now, I’m lying._ I turned thirty different colors between the choking and the horror that these words were filling the air while Marissa sat right there. I slammed my laptop shut violently.

“Everything okay?” Marissa asked, looking up from the newspaper she was flipping through, as if she was my grandmother and not a 19 year old model.

“Oh yeah,” I coughed, still riding out the last of the choking—almond milk may be delicious on cereal, but it is not for breathing—“just, you know, it’s rude to work at the table. Very rude. This is urgent though.” As I spoke I was grabbing my laptop and my cereal. I was headed downstairs towards my studio before the last of the words were out. Much less rude.

Safe in a soundproof box, walled in with any potential evidence of my infidelity/secret romantic history/ongoing despised longing for Davey, I started the track over.

It was not what I had expected.

For once, I knew what Davey wanted me to do, even if I didn’t know what he was really saying. I called him.

He answered on the second ring. Instead of hello, he said, “Let’s leave unsaid what’s left unspoken.”

“Don’t ask you if you’re okay, because you’re not?” I guessed. “But there’s nothing I can do, because I’m the one who…”

“Oh my boy, you’re oh so coy,” he said wryly. Then his voice changed, the humor leaving it. He spoke his lyrics, making plain the plea. “Please hold me now, I’m freezing. God tell me how we ever got this cold.”

I opened my mouth to say his name and bit it off, only the hard front of a _D_ escaping. If I couldn’t speak his name, I didn’t know what to say. I had no words to follow it. _Dave, Dave, Davey._ I loved him and I couldn’t love him. I had tried again and again and I had finally learned I could only ever damage him. I could not be what he wanted me to be.

“Let’s just pretend that nothing’s broken.” He sounded so vulnerable now, so utterly unguarded, so unlike the sharp, angular, ostentatiously camp person he’d become. For at least this one moment, he was not performing. He was the boy I’d known, not dead after all.

I couldn’t let him continue. I would come apart, if he was soft. He had to be hard and unyielding and cold, he had to hate me—if he was soft, if he wanted me, neither of us would survive.

“You know I can’t,” I said.

“I know you aren’t even _trying._ ” Davey’s words were a torrent, too fast to stop. “It was never easy for us, it has never been easy for us. We’ve always stumbled. But when it works, it is so, so good. I’m not ready to give that up. We can still find our way back.”

“Back to where? I have never been enough, been able to give enough—to be what you want. There is no place to go back to. There is no version of us that doesn’t just… hurt each other.”

“Come back. Just come back. I hate hating you.”

“And I can’t love you. Not enough.” I said it without knowing how it would sound. He was too fast for me—always speeding towards something, always escalating, always creating a great obscuring cloud with his words, panicking me into blurting out things that are better left unsaid, or at least better refined before spoken. I am my most clumsy, my most hurtful, when I’m backed into a corner.

It was so much easier when I could let him do the talking for me.

I meant—I meant that I couldn’t save him, or us, or anyone. That I was tired of trying. That every one of us could only give so much and I had given it. He had to hate me. I needed him to hate me.

“I meant it when I left,” I said. They were the wrong words, but I didn’t have any others to use. He used them all up, breathed in all the oxygen and soaked up all the words in any room he entered, so he had it all and I was drowning, helpless, lost.

“But I’m not okay.” Dave’s voice a whisper. “I’m not okay without you.”

“I’m sorry.” It was all I could say.

“So you lied, too.” Those four whispered words held more hurt than entire albums of his screaming. I wanted to protest. I wanted to insist I’d meant it all—even the things that time turned to lies. Because I had, then; and it was clear to him I didn’t, now.

So I said nothing.

I stayed silent. I listened while he cried. He sounded so far away.

He didn’t call again.

 

* 

We wrote over distance, our computers connecting where we would not. I saw his face the way everyone else did, only in pictures.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I have been... hardcore neglecting this story. I've been writing over in the FOB bandom, where things are considerably more cheerful. I haven't forgotten you. Someday I will finish this. AFI is in my blood. I promise. Please, tell me how YOU are! I miss you all. I miss our fandom.
> 
> Next: And our lives look smaller now, our lives look so small.


End file.
